
Glass. 



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PARIS DAYS AND EVENINGS 





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MLLE. SUBRA. 



PARIS DAYS AND 
EVENINGS 



BY 

STUART HENRY 



iriTH rn-ELVE illustrations 



PHILADELPHIA 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 

MDCCCXCVI 

• vV 



38639 

ET IN LUJETIA EGO 




\_All rights resen.ied.'] 



]. W. G 



J. H. S. 



CONTENTS. 



PHASES OF LIFE. 

CHAP. PAOE 

I. HOUSEHOLD GODS OF VICTOR HUGO ... 3 

- II. MY ABBE . . . . . . .19 

in. A GREAT FASHION HOUSE ..... 41 

IV. A BREAKFAST COLLOQUY . . . . .56 

V. AT THE JARDIN DES PLANTBS .... 68 

VI. THE DECLINE OF THE BOULEVARD DES ITALIENS . 78 

VII. PARIS DAYS AT DIEPPE . . . . .93 

VIII. PARISIAN FAMILY LIFE BY CONTRAST. . . 101 

IX. MOURNING FOR PRESIDENT CARNOT . . .113 



LETTERS AND COLOURS. 

X. THE ACADEMY ..... 

XL RENAN ...... 

XII. LITERARY LECTURES .... 

XIII. THE PARIS DAILIES . 

XIV. RANDOM PENCILLINGS IN THE SALONS 
XV. APROPOS OF A SARGENT PORTRAIT 
XVI. SUNLIGHT IN MODERN FRENCH PAINTING 

h 



121 
131 
141 
158 
168 
175 
181 



Contents. 



OPERA AND THEATRE. 

CHAP. 

XVir. LITTLE SOUVENIRS OF BIZET 
XVIII. MUSIC . . . 

XIX, MADEMOISELLE MARS 
XX. PH^DRE RACHEL AND BERNHARDT 

XXL MADEMOISELLE LUDWIG 
XXII. AMONG FAMOUS BALLET PEOPLE 



PAGE 

189. 
203 
211 
224 
237 
249 



THE LATIN QUARTIER. 



XXIII. THE QUARTIER BY DAY 

XXIV. THE QUARTIER BY NIGHT . 

XXV. THE ROMANCE OF A STUDENT'S MENAGE 



277 
287 
301 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



MLLE. SUBRA ...... 

HOUSEHOLD GODS OF VICTOR HUGO 

THE DECLINE OF THE BOULEVARDS DES ITALIEKS 

PARIS DATS AT DIEPPE .... 

THE ACADEMY ...... 

M. ROCHBGROSSE IX HIS ATELIER 

MUSIC ....... 

LOGE DE MLLE. LUDWIG (COMEDIE FRANCAISe) 
LOGE DE MLLE. LUDWIG (C0MED[E FRANCAISe) 
MLLE. MAURI, MLLE. SUBRA, MLLE. DE MERODA 
MARCHE AUX FLEURS .... 

THE ROMANCE OF A STUDENT'S MENAGE 



Fronti, 



apiece. ^ 



/ 



79 

92 
121'' 
180 
210^ 
236^ 
243"^ 
253' 
277 ' 
304 



PHASES OF LIFE 



Household Gods of Victor Hugo. 



itf 





Among the old build- 
ings in that noiseless 
quarter of Paris which 
lies dreaming of its 
royal past under 
the walls of the 
Luxembourg, 
there is a house 
that leans away 
from the street, as if 
disdainful of our age. It 
has an antique portal and an 
„ Henri Quatre stairw^ay. A vague 
'- ' tradition hints that some of the 
Medici resided in this hotel in 
the glorious and profligate days of 
Catherine and Marie. As one idles 
in its sombre rooms, with 
^^ their lofty ceilings and 

venerable oak floors, and 




HOUSEHOLD GODS OF VICTOR HUGO 



peers into the mysterious 
depths of its invisible wall closets, quaint 



4 Paris Days and Evenings. 

lines of the pensive Villon stray back into 
memory, and seem worth, in sucli a haunt, a 
hundred prophecies. Nowadays the apartments 
of the hel Stage of this edifice are decorated 
and filled with mementoes of Victor Hugo. 
An hour may be pleasantly spent here by 
any hero-worshipper, for these souvenirs give 
glimpses of the great man in his home life, 
and lend interest to certain of his books and 
verses. 

Of these relics, I fancy almost every person 
would ask to see first the pens that wrote " Les 
Miserables." They are here, at any rate, six of 
them — six modest quill pens, all fastened with a 
thread, side by side on a small piece of crumpled 
white paper. Just above them, in Victor Hugo's 
own hand, are the words, "Plumes des Miserables." 
Their points are ink-blacked and well worn out, 
and their barbs show stubborn use. Traces of 
the sweat of hard toil cover the white surfaces 
of their shafts, because they are just as they 
were when they left the fingers of the grand 
maitre. Steel pens did not come into noticeable 
service in France until about 1834, and Victor 
Hugo never used them in writing his manuscripts. 
Indeed a quill, with its broad, varying strokes 
and pliableness, was in every way more suited 
to his nature. And then the aristocratic associa- 



Household Gods of Victor Hugo. 5 

tions of the quill, whicli seems to belong to the 
age of the sedan chair and the minuet, were 
probably quite agreeable to him, for, with all his 
democracy, he courted a title of nobility and a 
family tradition of caste. 

" Les Miserables " is Victor Hugo. Perhaps 
there never was a more automorphic novel. It 
is read, I imagine, with more enthusiasm in 
America than in France. The French consider 
Victor Hugo their greatest poet, but not their 
greatest novelist. For them his fiction is too 
diffuse and shadowy. 

The pens of "Les Miserables" repose by the 
side of an old companion — a black leather sack, 
carefully rolled up in two strong straps. It 
displays this inscription : — 

" Since you request it, I attest here the little adventure of 
this sack. It travelled with me fifteen hundred miles in 
1861, when I left Guernsey on account of my health. I 
carried with me the manuscript of ' Les Miserables,' which I 
completed en route. I put the manuscript in this sack, and 
this sack, which I did not abandon for a moment, voyaged 
with me in England, Belgium, and Holland five months — 
from March 26th to September 3rd, 1861. Guernsey, 
May 21, 1863. Yictor Hugo." 

By the side of the sack are several stones, bullets, 
and a rust-eaten horse-shoe. He picked them up 
on the field of Waterloo when writing his im- 



6 Paris Days and Evenings. 

mortal chapters on the battle. Each stone bears 
its legend : " Champs de Waterloo, ramassee par 
moi, 19 mai, 1861"; "30 mai, 1861— 'Les 
Miserables' "; "9 juin, 1861, plaine de Waterloo " 
— and so on. Here also is the greasy cap which 
he wore when he escaped from Paris at the time 
of the coup d'etat. It was given him for the 
purpose by one of his plebeian admirers— a 
journeyman printer. 

The walls of these apartments are covered 
with panels, inside doors, screens and mirrors, 
all of which V^ictor Hugo ornamented with the 
brush during his exile. He never studied paint- 
ing, but he had a talent for it, and, together with 
his promenades, it was his pastime. At the end 
of the salon is the red chimneypiece which he 
designed and embellished at Guernsey. Red was 
evidently the colour he preferred. In the centre 
of this chimneypiece there is a fine Venetian 
mirror. Four porcelain statuettes, representing 
the seasons, enliven its summits, and some Rouen 
faience is encrusted in its woodwork. At its 
sides are chimeras, and it rests on a black 
background, where the poet painted tv/o large 
dragons and, in big letters as usual, the ubiqui- 
tous "V.H." 

Naturally, as the leader of the Romantic 
school in France, he had a penchant for the 



Household Gods of Victoi^- Htigo. 7 

hideous animals tliat haunted the art, literature, 
and religious life of the Middle Ages. For he it 
was who embalmed the architecture of Northern 
France in the French language. He immortalised 
Notre Dame de Paris in a novel. He put Gothic 
architecture into appropriate rhyme ; the expand- 
ing, upward sweep of its clustered columns, the 
pointed, aspiring curve of its arches, the rapid 
flight of its lofty buttresses, the delicate textures 
of its traceries and foliations ; its monks and 
frightening monsters, its aerial galleries and 
fragile arcades, the slender heights of its soaring 
pinnacles and steeples — all he crystallised in 
poetry. 

Notice how, in Ballad XH. of the "Odes 
and Ballades," the ds, oiis, and ombres, 
in trisyllabic stanzas of eight lines, imitate the 
columned solemnity of the interior of a Gothic 
cathedral ; the elles, illes, ete's, etre's, dite's, and 
Sle's its lace -like fringes and network ; the es, 
IS, and eres its needle-form denticles and spires. 
And in the ommcs, onne's, and ammes, how 
perfectly one hears the drowsy chant of 
mumbling priests ! 

One finds, therefore, among these household 
ornaments of the poet of the ogive, many 
dragons and gargoyles, and one discovers that, 
like the old cathedral builders and decorators, he 



8 Paris Days and Evenings. 

was fond of giving flight to unexpected, half- 
irreverent fancies. On one of the panels he 
painted a monk whose extremely doleful show 
of piety provokes laughter. His hands_ are 
devoutly clasped, and he is gazing up, with a 
most forlorn and sanctified mien, at the fierj^ 
avenging angel which appears above. On one of 
the inside doors there is a black, ugly jinnee. 
His arms and legs are crossed, and his eyes, 
m.outh, and toes are fiercely red. It brings to 
mind the poem of "The Jinnees" in "Les 
Orientales," which is not only a successful 
description in rhyme of the passing of a troop 
of genii — the oncoming, the rushing by, and 
the dying away in the distance — but is interest- 
ing also for the fact that its first and last stanzas 
picture silence with surpassing charm and eff'ec- 
tiveness. The hush of nature is put into the 
very form and sound of the verse : — 

Murs, ville, 
Et port, 
Asile 
De mort 
Mer grise 
Oil brise 
La brise 
Tout dort. 



Household Gods of Victor Hugo. g 

On doute 
La nuit ... 
J'ecoute : — 
Tout fuit, * 
Tout passe ; 
L'espace 
Efface 
Le bruit. 

Other favourite subjects of these decorations 
on wood are flowers, grotesque birds, and happy 
Chinamen. One of the Chinamen, with a dough- 
like face of celestial imbecility, is waving a fan ; 
and another is merrily cracking his heels to- 
gether, over the back of a chair, in such a 
manner that his shadow and that of the chair 
form " V.H." on the floor. Victor Hugo's 
cuisiniere for many years was an elderly 
faithful person called Suzanne. One day, after 
one of her savoury breakfasts, he said to her : 
"Suzanne, I am going to make a portrait of 
your future husband." And this is he on this 
plaque — a monstrous Chinaman seated at a table, 
and gleefully, but awkwardly, brandishing a fork 
as a preliminary to a gluttonous attack on a 
enormous fish. Just above is his name, Shu-Zan. 

One's notice is especially attracted by three 
mirrors, on whose wide borders the poet painted 
flowers, vines, birds, and butterflies. One of 
these mirrors bears this inscription : " Drawn 



TO Paris Days and Evenings. 

May 11, 1870, while they are judging and con- 
demning me at Paris." He referred, of course, 
to the Bonapartists. On the upper margin of 
this mirror there is an ink drawing of a chateau 
across the twilight. The colour of the natural 
pine adds a brilliant effect when a light is thrown 
on it at night. This recalls his wonderful habit 
of cleverl}^ utilising and making the most of all 
the materials at his hand, however commonplace 
they were. For him no incident was too in- 
significant to become the theme of a poem or a 
chapter. 

There are here, too, many of his pictures and 
drawings on paper surfaces, and they are suffi- 
ciently weird and sombre to entitle them to be 
hung in that fin de siecle Eomantic exhibition, 
called the Rosicrucian Salon. Two curious 
drawings in crayon haunt the eye. One is of a 
majestic cock who is saluting the dusky gray of 
early morn — a surprisingly stately chanticleer, 
who gives emphatic evidence of the poet's 
natural skill with chalks. Another is a repre- 
sentation of John Brown — a shrouded form 
hang-ing from a scaffold. Dim streams of 
peculiar light fall on the mysterious figure as 
it defines itself vaguely against the dark back- 
ground. It is signed "Victor Hugo, I860." 
He was writing- " Les Miserables " at the time. 



Household Gods of Victor Htigo. 1 1 

The laro-est of these strang-e sketches has the 
legend of the book and the sword for its subject. 
It is a view of a black and ruined city. In the 
foreground, on the top of a lofty column, an 
aged prophet stands reading a volume. At one 
side is the sentence : " Non liber monet, non 
giadius servat." 

Victor Hugo had a fancy for old oak furniture 
as well as for chimeras. It seems fittins; that he 
should have had about him so much of the noble 
household ware of the Louis XIII. epoch. Its 
ampleness and strength suggest him at once. 
For instance, here is the fine oak table on which 
" La Legende des Siecles " was written. It is 
about two by four feet in size. Its legs are 
stout and twisted. It was apparently built to 
last as long as Notre Dame itself. On the 
worm-eaten top one reads : " Je donne a 
Madame . . . cette table sur laquelle j'ai ecrit 
La Legende des Siecles [I give to Madame — • — ■ 
this table, on which I wrote ' La Legende des 
Siecles']. — Victor Hugo, Guernsey, 19 aout, 
1859." The ink-spots he left on it remain 
intact. In the way of historical furniture there 
may be mentioned a church stall which was in 
the " galerie de chene " at Hauteville House, his 
home at Guernsey during exile. The words 
" VIVE AMA " were carved on it at his bidding. It 



12 Paris Days and Evenings. 

was occupied in olden times, it is said, by 
certain " Mesdames de France " whenever the)'" 
w^ere present at the ceremonies in the cathedral 
of Chartres. 

The gem of these relics of Victor Hugo has to 
be taken out of an iron safe, and then out of a 
perfumed sachet of satin moire. It is the first 
copy of " Les Chatiments " of Hetzel's edition of 
1872. It is on Holland paper, and has deep-red 
covers of shark skin. On the back are the gilt 
initials "V. H," and embossed on the front is 
an immense, gold-embroidered bee. On one of 
the fly-leaves are the words : " First copy — At 
the feet of my Providence — To her who has 
saved more than my life — who has saved my 
manuscripts." He had reference to Madame 
Drouet's devotion to him at the time of the 
cowp d'etat. 

On another page he wrote the following 
explanation : 

" The bee wliicli is on the cover of this book, before adorn- 
ing the ' Les Chatiments,' adorned the imperial throne. It was 
embroidered on the velvet of the immense purple mantle which 
hung down in lambrequins from the canopy, and covered the 
throne at the Tuileries. In September 1870, M. Jules 
Claretie, member of the Commission appointed to search the 
papers of Bonaparte, detached this bee from the mantle of 
the throne, and brought it to me. Victor Hugo. 

"Paris, May 21, 1872." 



Household Gods of Victor Hugo. 1 3 

On another fly-leaf of the book he transcribed 
the lines : 

" Filles de la lumiere, abeilles, 
Envolez-vous de ce manteaii ! " 

These are taken from one of the most beautiful 
poems of the collection — " The Imperial Mantle." 
Bees were the Napoleonic emblem, and at Jersey, 
in June 1853, Victor Hugo addressed to them 
these verses, which are unsurpassed among 
French lyrics. How little did even he dream, 
perhaps, w^hen grouping these rhymes as a 
derided exile, that a bee from Napoleon's dis- 
graced and empty throne would one day repose 
on a volume of " Les Chatiments" as a unique 
witness of^the poet's final triumph and assured 
glory ! 

One spring morning I was sitting on the 
balcony of this apartment of Victor Hugo's 
hearthstone gods, with the amiable and 
scholastic hermit to whom they have descended 
by legacy. He lives here, buried away from 
the present in his adoration of the great epoch 
of French Eomanticism. We were taking a 
cup of coffee, and looking over into an old lost 
Paris garden, full of lonely trees and turtle- 
doves, and flanked by the closed fayade of some 
ancient and forgotten hotel. I was asking my 
friend, to whom I had become attached by 



14 Paris Days and Evenings. 

many months of companionship, what was 
Victor Hugo's real character. And I wrote 
down the following little outline of an estimate 
of the illustrious man, dictated by one who 
w^as one of the household acquaintances during 
the last thirty years of the poet's life. 

" Victor Hugo loved glory above all things, 
but his passion for money was abnormal. He 
was almost a miser. There was a pinched look 
in his face, and he had a way of holding 
his hands with the fingers pointed down and 
pressed together. He was extremely cautious 
and wary. It might not be quite true to say 
that he accumulated money for the mere 
pleasure of doing so, still it practically amounted 
to that, at least, during the latter half of his 
career. He was rich when the coiij) d'etat 
occurred, and died a ' millionaire,' leaving fifty 
thousand francs to the poor, and the rest to 
his family. His family then consisted of a 
daughter hopelessly insane, a daughter-in-law, 
and two grandchildren. During his exile and 
during his last years in Paris, he gave frequently 
to the needy, yet in exceedingly small sums. 
He never endowed nor materially aided an 
institution of any kind. For him charity and 
pity for the miserable meant the expression of 
sympathy, not generous money donations nor 



Household Gods of Victor Httgo. 1 5 

real personal sacrifice ; and it must be confessed 
that this sympathy always found its way into 
such verse and prose that it brought him 
princely sums from his publishers. He was 
very methodical, and watched his affairs closely, 
even housekeeping details. He was a shrewd 
and careful business man. 

" His egoism was colossal and his ambition 
unbounded, still one hardly would have suspected 
them from his bearing. He had such a quiet 
modest demeanour, he was so uniformly simple 
in his manner, he imposed himself so little on 
those about him, that you would not have 
guessed that it was all skilful acting. It was 
the most sublime egoism. I do not know that 
he fully realised it himself. The art was so 
natural, perfect, and even appropriate, that it 
might have passed for a virtue. It was agree- 
able to those around him, and he never was 
sensitive about it. One of his friends, a lady, 
once presented him with a quill pen, having 
'Ego-Hugo' suggestively embroidered on it 
in silk. Far from being offended by it for a 
moment, he was amused and pleased. He was 
not proud, but he was vain. It should be re- 
membered, however, that he had the unique 
fate of being surrounded for nearly seventy 
years by those who were always lauding his 



1 6 Paris Days and Evenings. 

genius in the most extravagant terms. Never- 
theless, he was master of himself — of his passions 
as well as his mind. Whether he guarded or 
dismissed his ill-will toward a person depended 
on polic}^ None knew so well as he how to 
take care of and exploit a reputation. 

" On the whole, he excelled in precisely those 
qualities which are least peculiar to his race, 
qualities which are associated with a powerful 
imagination. While he might very properly be 
called, in certain aspects, the Napoleon of his 
national literature, he was more Teutonic than 
French in the huge proportions of his ponderous 
literary arsenal. Yet, of course, he did not wish 
to be thought anything but French. In spite 
of his advocacy of the equality and brotherhood 
of man, he was Chauvinistic. He was fond, 
for instance, of recommending the formation of 
the United States of Europe, but it was with 
the tacit understanding that Paris would be the 
capital and France the leading state. He 
appeared to think that all civilisation would 
eventually become French. This belief in the 
overwhelming superiority of his race was en- 
couraged by the fact that he knew little of the 
other people. 

"It is not to be denied that his republicanism 
was due to the Second Empire's failure to satisfy 



Household Gods of Victor Hugo. 1 7 

liis own political aspirations. His career in 
politics was governed by personal motives rather 
than by a disinterested interest in the welfare 
of the people. He was too ambitious and politic 
to be what the world would call unqualifiedly 
a sincere man. Events governed him rather 
than principles. His eye was on the effect. 
The only reform he urged all his life without 
change was the abolition of the penalty of death 
for criminals — a reform which could be advo- 
cated safely, while serving his pen as a proper 
subj ect. 

" Americans will find these traits character- 
istically displayed in his letter to the United 
States (' Actes et Paroles,' II.) written before the 
execution of John Brown. The gist of it is the 
prediction that the ' fissure latente ' which this 
proposed ' murder ' would cause, Avould end in 
dismembering the Union. There is no reference 
to the Slavery question, and no counsel or 
sympathy, is given either to the North, the 
South, or the blacks. It was just what he in- 
tended it should be — a letter that no one could 
take exception to, that committed him in no 
way, and that sounded well. He thought the 
breaking out of the American Civil War was 
merely the penalty for the crime of America 
in hanging John Brown. No one equalled him 



1 8 Paris Days and Evenings. 

in making empty phrases resound like inspired 
wisdom and pregnant prophecy. 

" There was much artificiality about his senti- 
ment. On a page in one of his own texts of 
' Les Miserables,' he pencilled this memorandum 
as if for his own guidance — ' Here is a place to 
weep.' He was considerate, indulgent, in his 
home circle. His friends were enthusiastic and 
devoted admirers of his genius rather than of 
himself. His soul of souls was always veiled 
even to those dearest to him. 

" He felt that he was a torch in the rio-ht 
hand of the Great Unknown. I think he really 
considered himself a part of Deity on earth. M. 
Deschanel, his eminent friend, is fond of 
characterising him by the line, ' Et maintenant, 
Seigneur, expliquons-nous tous deux ' [And now, 
Lord, let us come to an understanding]. This 
trait in Victor Hugo was due, not to the typical 
French indifference about such things, but to his 
mighty belief in himself." 



My Abbe. 



{Jxdy 1894). 
One wlio sojourns long in France is almost cer- 
tain, sooner or later, to number among his 
acquaintances an Abbe — a soft-handed, smiling, 
unctuous Abbe. My Abbe— so I call him to my- 
self affectionately — is about the dearest of my 
French friends. He is, indeed, a loose-shoed 
comfort to me, because, for one reason, I do not 
need to change my attire when I go to see him. 
This may seem a trivial matter, yet, with the 
months, it has come to mean much, and has 
persuaded me into many adventitious calls upon 
him w^hich should have been distributed else- 
where on the little checker-board of my social 
acquaintanceship in Paris. For I may avow in 
all frankness, with the consciousness of revealing- 
no secret, that my Abbe makes no pretension as 
a shining example of that virtue which we are 
assured comes next to godliness. 

We first met across a game of chess at a 
soiree in the St Sulpice Quartier. As he had 



20 Paris Days and Evenings. 

only learned to play cliess in his later years, and 
always lost his queen about the twelfth move, 
notw^ithstanding the unvarying crudeness of my 
openings and developments, we abandoned this 
hobby after a month or two for another and 
greater one that chanced to be common to us 
both — Victor Hugo. It would be drawing it 
mildly to say that the Abbe is daft, vertiginous, 
corybantic on the subject of Hugo, for there 
is a no more crazy Hugoldtre than he in all 
France. 

The frenzy dates back to his youth. A dream- 
ing Breton, he was born a full-fledged Romantic 
in the epoch of Madame Bovary, and he remains 
one still, ignoring later movements and schools. 
When a very young man — it was in 1869 — he 
wrote to the great poet at Gruernsey, naively 
begging for light amidst all the light that came 
pouring forth in those days fj'om that isle. 
" Where," he prayed, " on what page, in what 
line, in what word, is the one central, funda- 
mental, all-embracing truth of the thirty volumes 
of your inspired pen ? " 

The reply was couched in something like these 
terms : "Of course a letter, and many letters, 
would not suffice to respond adequately to your 
enquiry. My message is in no one phrase, in 
no one stanza, in no one volume of my writings. 



My Abbs. 21 

To find it you must read them all, for it is therein 
that I have put my soul." The Abbe and I think 
that is one of the most solemnly beautiful and 
profound responses a mortal ever received from 
earth. While more prosaic people would see in 
this a scheme of the thrifty, money-making 
poet to induce the Abbe to buy the whole edi- 
tion of his works, we perceive the revelation of 
a magnificent personality. 

Imagine what delight it was for the Abbe to 
call at the modest hotel in the Avenue \^ctor 
Hugo during the poet's last years ! One evening 
— how proudly he always recounts this I — he was 
in a corner of -the salon alone with Hugo. The 
master was on a settee, the Abbe was on a stool 
at his feet. And the mighty genius of "La 
Legende cles Siecles" and " Les Miserables " was 
answering his questions, and talking to him with 
the expansive freedom of a confidence, despite 
the presence of other guests. Finally, Madame 
Drouet came over in her tactful, august way, 
with the words : " Cher maitre, we can spare 
you no longer to Monsieur I'Abbe — the other 
friends are beginning to notice how you are 
nepiectino' them." But Huo;o waved her off" with 
a peaceful hint of impatience, and a " Presently," 
and, as she quietly turned away, he said to the 
Abbe in an intimate undertone : "Don't be 



2 2 Paris Days and Evenings. 

disturbed ; we can continue." Ah, what a 
triumphant, immortal moment that was for our 
humble friend ! 

" Oh, yes," said a Parisian litterateur, who 
happened to be present on one occasion when 
the Abbe was relating the incident, '' it was 
sublime — if one could be sure that Hugo was not 
posing for you and the company. It was difficult 
to know whether he was genuinely simple and 
grandiose in his bearing acd language under such 
circumstances, or whether he was one of the most 
consummate actors the world has ever seen off 
the stage. I was dining at Hugo's one day when 
Louis Blanc was present. I was placed at Hugo's 
right hand, and Louis Blanc, who, you know, 
was as big as your little finger, sat next me. 
Hugo served me first, somewhat to my confusion 
and to the half- disguised surprise of Louis Blanc, 
for I was a young and unknown fellow between 
those two famous old men. In one aspect it 
seemed truly republican and people-honouring 
in Hugo ; yet it left me the half-relished souvenir 
that Hugo was merely trying to plague Louis 
Blanc at the expense of my insignificance. 
There was much of the vieux malin about Hugo, 
and I, for my part, never knew how to take 
him." 

To return to the Abbe. One summer's nio-ht 



My Aby. 23 

found us under the walls of the great, gloomy 
Seminary of St Sulpice, plotting a series of 
excursions to the \arious forests around Paris 
for the purpose of reading some of our poet's 
verse in the open green-shaded air. As a result, 
on bright days we might have been seen taking 
the train for the woods of Clamart, or lazily 
sunning ourselves on some boat as it skimmed 
along on its way to Vincennes or down the river 
to the terrace of Meudon and the heights of St 
Cloud. The afternoon would be taken up with 
a superb passage in " Les Contemplations," or 
with some curious poem of "La Legende des 
Siecles," or with some high-plunging, big- 
thumbed ecstasy in "Dieu." For we read here 
and there and everyvv'here, without sequence or 
coherence, in Hugo's twenty volumes of rhyme, 
just as the mood stopped us or as fancy sped 
us on. 

Now and then we would get lost in a thicket 
in one of the books, and once I asked the Abbe, 
'■ Why do you suppose Victor Hugo planted such 
scrub oak and underbrush as this in his verse ? " 
The Abbe, in the utmost seriousness, approached 
his face close to mine, looked me gravely in the 
eye, and spoke as if it were a sacrilegious thing 
to be pointing out a defect in his idol. " I will 
tell you why, and I hope you will excuse me if I 



24 Paris Days and Evenings. 

employ a bit of slang. There is one idiom 
which expresses it so pat that I cannot well 
refrain from using it. The trouble with Victor 
Hugo is this : he thought that all the phrases he 
dashed off had the inspired touch of immortality, 
and that there weie none such — ' il se gobe ! ' (he 
swallows himself!) " 

But it was grand when we were both swept up 

across magnificent spaces of the infinite blue 

by our poet, and once in a while the Abb^ would 

close the book in a sort of seraphic paralysis, and 

try to find a sentence to girdle his beatitude, 

sometimes losing himself into silence as, with 

open mouth and eyes and outstretched hand, he 

would miss trace in the air of the nameless word 

he was just about to seize to describe his colossal 

wonderment and jo}''. Again, it would be some 

emotional passage in " Les Contemplations," and 

our tears would well softly forth, and we would 

blow our noses tenderly, half proud and half 

ashamed of the fact that we, two full-grown 

men, were sitting out in the broad light of 

the afternoon, and weeping over some simple 

rhyme. 

Frequently the Abbe would chance to pick up 
"Les Chansons des rues et des bois," and read 
aloud from its satyr pages. It was a study for 
me to see him thoughtlessly grazing in these 



My Abbd.. 25 

half- forbidden pastures. Occasionally I would 
give him an opportunity to come to a realising 
sense of the situation, by asking him perhaps 
this : " Can you imagine why Victor Hugo, at 
the age of sixty-three, published such frivolous, 
such erotic verse, as all this ? " The Abbe would 
look up, reflect for a moment, shake his head, 
and say : " Isn't it incredible ? I have never 
been able to explain it." Then, after another 
pause, he would gently turn the leaf, and con- 
tinue the grisette stanzas. 

Yet I knew it could not be possible that he 
was really a little fond of these wanton-eyed, 
short-skirted gaieties. I was amused one day 
when, in reading the poem " L'Eglise " in " Les 
Chansons," he intoned these lines : 

" La plus belle feuille du monde 
]^e peut donner que se qu'elle a." 

As the words came from his lips, 1 could not 
suppress a sound of laughter. He insisted on 
knowing what it meant, so I finally told him 
that these verses recalled a couplet of a certain 
Chat Noir song — indeed, that it was the identical 
couplet with one word changed. " Yes," he 
remarked naively, with the promptness and 
frankness of a momentary impulse, "I was 
thinking of that too." I said to myself: " Cecy 



26 Paris Days and Evenings. 

nous d^monstre en toute evidence," as Balzac 
would have written at the close of a " Conte 
Drolatique," that it is difficult, even for an Abb^ 
in Paris, not to have caught a few rhymes of 
Xanrof on the branches of his memory. 



But it would be unfair to intimate that the 
Abbe never indoctrinates one about any theme 
except Victor Hugo, for he talks eloquently on 
many a subject. For instance, he outlined a 
suggestive idea one morning, when an elderly 
friend was complaining to us of own Jin de siecle 
in this fashion — " Our epoch has become too 
dangerously speculative in its commercial 
theories and business habits. Nowadays men 
count on making a fortune in five or ten years — 
they try to fabricate something out of nothing 
by a turn of luck, by a twist of the fancy, not 
by slow, honest effort and sure, accumulative 
methods. We have nothing in these times but 
speculators filling the air with unheard-of 
schemes, cultivating and exploiting unwarranted 
expectations in people, and demoralising the 
public with illusive projects that promise money 
without work or merit " 

" Yes," said the Abbe, " I believe it is worse 
in our day than ever ; yet, suppose it is, are not 



My Abbd. 27 

you and I, two old Romantics, directly respon- 
sible for it in a way ? For it was precisely 
these fantastic, imaginative, emotional features 
and qualities which our Hugo school infused into 
letters and life — the sound and echo of noisy 
successes, of romantic luck and epic adventure 
and foolhardiness, always crowned in the end 
with good fortune. The traits that characterise 
the literature of an epoch are sure to characterise, 
sooner or later, the commercial world and business 
customs. Look at Hugo himself, skilfully making 
a din about his books, giving them a great 
reclame, 'booming' them, floating them at a fine 
price on the public, and dying a millionaire as 
the result! Our Romantic school w^as largely 
the cause of all this modern love of the incredible 
and trust in the possible." 

A favourite pastime of the Abbe is to follow 
the lectures and examinations at the Sorbonne. 
One afternoon he took me over to the New 
Sorbonne to listen to the oral examination of a 
candidate for the Ph.U. Four professors — MM. 
Janet and Himly and two colleagues — were in 
array behind a desk, and were gaily roasting a 
squirming young man, who was dressed in a 
swallowtail and white kids, and was supposed to 
be sitting, with his back to the audience, in a 
chair on a small platform. In spite of the lively 



28 Paris Days and Evenings . 

St Lawrence spectacle, I soon felt drowsy and 
longed to drop away into dreamland, for the 
theme of torture was very abstract and dessicated. 
At length I could not repress my curiosity to 
look around and see if the Abb4 were actually 
enjoying this lengthy and abstruse performance 
— and behold! there he was cosily asleep at my 
side ! When he awoke, he seemed as glad to' 
get away as I! 

It is perhaps needless to say that the Abbe 
finds much to criticise in the Parisian literary 
critics and conferenciers of the present day, for— 
full-winged Eomantic — he belongs to a past 
generation. He will hit off M. Brunetiere in the 
following strain : "Yes, I have been over to the 
Sorbonne this winter and heard two or three of 
the lectures of M, Brunetiere on Bossuet. Now, 
for my part, I, as an ecclesiastic, do not attach 
much importance to the discussion of church 
theses by litterateurs. Some of our Catholic 
people are delighted with the fact that 
Brunetiere is glorifying one of our leading- 
apostles, and have remarked to me — '(3h, we must 
stand by him ; he is doing us immense good ; 
here is a strong ally ; he has come to us.' I do 
not understand it so. The first words with 
which M. Brunetiere opened this series of lectures 
were these : ' Those who study Bossuet belong to 



My Abbd. ; 29 

two classes — those who have faith, and those who 
have not, I may say frankly, and at once, that 
I am of the second class.' What is there in that 
for us ? 

" It was the same way with Taine. When he 
published the initial volumes of ' Les Origines,' 
many of our number clapped their hands, and 
exclaimed: 'See how he has taken up the cudgels 
for the Church — he is one of us now ! ' I was 
sceptical about him, for I lived round the corner 
from his house, and saw in his daily life no 
evidence of an}^ change denoting that he had 
turned toward Catholicism. I was right, and his 
later books showed my friends their mistake. 

" I know that M. Brunetiere is rather the 
fashion to-day, yet I confess there is not much 
in him for me. To begin with, he is too 
pedantic. He is always displaying vast arrays 
of names of authors and authorities of all cen- 
turies, races, and kinds, known and unknown. 
He wishes to overwhelm you — to astonish you 
into silence by the length and breadth of his 
reading. He has read, unquestionably, many 
authors, but he has thoroughly digested few. 
He has never taken time to do so. He does 
not live with his authors. He writes in hot 
haste, and at the same moment, on several 
different topics, without waiting to let time 



30 Paris Days aud Evenings. 

mature a judgment or ripen an opinion. These 
are feats of an acrobat — a j aggler ; it is not the 
highest form of literary criticism. His essays 
are full of rude projections and abrupt descents, 
of crude ridges and crags, and jagged valleys, 
which time has not smoothed down nor filled in. 
He approaches his themes too newly, and thrusts 
at us general impressions ; first drafts, and when 
you examine his official-sounding language at 
the crucial point in his subject, you usually dis- 
cover a ' perhaps ' or ' it is probable ' slipped in, 
showing that he leaves the real tug at the idea 
for someone else — he has merely scrambled 
together suggestions. 

" So he thunders along alike on all questions 
and writers. He o-oes hammering; through the 
most delicate prose and the most aff'ecting verse, 
apparently unconscious of their true charm. He 
has no compassion, no sympathy, no affection — 
he is always metallic, arbitrary, and absolute ; 
and still, if you turn back in his essays of ten 
years ago, you need not be surprised to find 
that he was saying the contrary of what he is 
saying to-day in the same authoritative m.anner. 
In our age we prefer to have subjects approached 
humanly, not dogmatically. Nothing that is 
absolute is human. AVe do not like to be 
whipped into line in heUes-lettres, as if we were, 



My Abbd. 31 

always more or less benighted or wilfully 
aberrant. Absolutism inevitably means a 
narrow or superficial outlook — prejudices. 

"M. Brunetiere piques himself on being an 
impersonal critic, yet he is the most personal 
of them all. His enmities in the flesh are 
decidedly pronounced. If some one whom he 
does not like holds an opinion about the thesis 
he is treating, he is quite sure to take a reac- 
tionary view. His style — his language — is very 
eftective as it comes from his lips. He is an orator 
— the most successful one I have ever heard in a 
chair of literature ; but his paragraphs become 
abominably poor French when put into print." 

As for the other celebrated lecturers in the 
Rue des Ecoles, the Abbe is no less exactina*. 
He is not disposed to emphasise their admir- 
able and unusual qualities. He will say: " M. 
Deschanel, as a conferencier, is too light and 
amusing to suit my taste. He loves to make 
the ladies titter. And Larroumet also is a lady's 
professor. Of course, the ladies — you know my 
notion about them — I say, call it pretty and 
inofiensive if you will, still, for what I hold to be 
literature in its best sense, all this is of precious 
little value. M. Faguet ? Well, M. Faguet is 
very adept, clever, ingenious, able in fact, but he 
is — how shall I express it ? — a kind of farceur. 



32 Paris Days and Evenings. 

I mean that letters have become a routine with 
him. What he seeks is not to be constructively 
helpful, and to be working in an orderly and 
responsible way, so much as to be original, 
gymnastic, diverting. He has the air of saying 
to his classes : " Now, let us go at this — it's our 
metier, you know — we must get through w^ith 
it; so let us do it creditably, and with as little 
ennui as possible." 

It is a pity to introduce these severe lines into 
the tender, amiable picture of my Abbe, yet T 
should not be wholly true to my theme if 1 did 
not do so, for he, like other mortals, has his 
austere moods, when he shows that he can trace 
a sharp angle, and be as keenly incisive as the 
critics themselves. So let us hasten to finish 
this portion of the sketch by noting that, with 
all his gentleness, sentimentality, and love of 
the ideal, he draws the line at woman. He 
seems to have a veritable fear of her. I have 
never heard him speak of his mother or a 
sister. 

He was remarking one evening : "I cannot 
bear to have even a maid- servant in the liouse. 
A woman used to come in and cook my meals 
and take care of my room. She was eternally 
pricking me with interrogation points, and 
pestering me with household attentions. She 



My Abbe. ^t, 

would ask me two or three times a day what I 
wished for the next meal. I became tired of it, 
and told her she might do my room and I would 
prepare my own repasts. Finally I said to my- 
self, ' If you can cook, you can do your own 
chamber work ' — so I dismissed her. What a 
comfort to feel that you are not to be inter- 
rupted every hour by afemme de menage ! It is 
alw^ays a relief to me to know there is not a 
woman about the premises." 

To reinvoke, then, if w^e can, something of the 
blowsy serenity of the Abbe. Last summer he 
was offered, and urged to accept, a tempting 
office connected with the Hierarchy in Eome. He 
remarked to me : ' ' They wanted me to come to 
Eome. Should I go or not ? This incident 
greatly troubled my tranquillity. My friends 
said : ' What ! refuse an opportunity to be in 
the highest ecclesiastical circles ? ' I at last told 
them : ' No ! I am a Frenchman, and love my 
liberty ! There is no place like Paris for me. I 
prefer to be free and tied to no one — not even to 
a cardinal ! ' " This partly answered the query I 
had often propounded to myself : "Is the Abbe a 
Frenchman first, or a Catholic ? Is he religious 
before he is patriotic ? " 

One evening last October he came to see me, 
and divulged the secret that in three weeks he was 



34 Paids Days and Evenings. 

to preach a sermon in a village' near Versailles. 
He appears in tlie pulpit so seldom, and fears so 
niuch any light of publicity, that he confided his 
undertaking to me as if it were a confession; 
And to prevent me from being present,, he 
refused to give the name of the parish. But he 
recited to me his sermon, which he had already 
written and memorised. It had been scrupur 
lously and affectionately.polished, and, with its 
lyrical flights, was as tender and poetical as a 
lover's song. 

;^ Last winter the. Abke became the almoner of 
■a Hospital, or Kefuge, in a hamlet that crowns a 
low-lying hill a mile or two south of Paris. 
One afternoon in May I went out by train in 
quest of him, for I had not heard from him for 
some time. I rang the bell at the great green 
faded portals of his ancient hermitagej once the 
hunting seat of. a favourite of Louis XV. The 
doors opened, and there, in an old grass-checkered 
court, and not three feet away from me, stood 
the. most beautifid nun I have ever beheld. 
Fra Ana:elico mio-ht have dreamed of her. She 
was dressed in a black and cream-coloured garb, 
and wore the conventional white band around 
her face. Her features seemed celestial in their 
regular outlines and in their soft cast of sweet 
serenity. Her beauty, and the . fa-ct that it had 



. ,- -My Abbd.' 35 

not occurred to me that a woman would be seen 
in the haunts of the Abbe, trifled somewhat with 
the poise of my question as I asked her if 1 might 
see him. She conducted me, with her clattering 
sandals, through several doors and halls. We 
came to a gate in a garden wall, and, as if opened 
in response to her summons with a bell, she bade 
me "Bonjour, Monsieur," and disappeared. 

I found myself in a small square garden full 
of cherry-trees in -bloom, and made my way to 
the house that stood at one side. I surprised 
the Abbe in the loveliest of moods in his room, 
for he had just come out of a delicious nap. We 
began participating at once in one of our com- 
munions of souls. He described how he had 
dreaded the thought of quitting Paris, and how 
soon he had learned to adore the country and 
his life here of a hermit. His four walls were in 
reality narrow and low, yet he lengthened them 
into the spaciousness of a palatial gallery in the 
stretches of his musing on the past and on the 
future ; and no mural decoration, he said, could 
be more sumptuous than that with which his 
fancy ornamented his cell. 

AVhen he spoke of his solitude, I could not 
refrain from hinting that there seemed, never- 
theless, to be maidens to open the gate to his 
flowery bower, and that-- some people migit 



36 Paris Days and Evenings. 

think that even a Piagnone painter was to be 
envied if such were the circumstances. . . . The 
Abbe did not appear to notice the suspicion of a 
jest, and I did not urge my timid impeachment. 
He simply remarked : " Oh, there are two or 
three hundred women and girls over the wall 
there, but they do not trouble me, for I do not 
confess them, and then I have a private door 
into the street through which I come and go 
without being seen by anyone." 

As we talked, we looked out of his window 
over little fragrant fields of flowers and fruits, 
and smoothed our vision along the long ribbons 
of green, villa-dotted hills. He told me that all 
men were more or less egoists ; that he himself 
was something of an egoist though his life and 
mission were so lowly, for, while he abjured 
wealth, ambition, and what the world at large 
called pleasure, and asked for nothing except a 
bed and some food and raiment, and leisure to 
bathe his soul in the firmament, his career was, 
after all, the choice and product of his indolence. 
" And really," he said, "do we now owe our first 
duty to ourselves, and should not that first duty 
be gentleness ? ' II fiiut etre doux envers soi- 
meme ' (One should be gentle to himself) is the 
favourite of my mottoes. When in doubt as to 
what course to pursue, I always ask myself^ 



My Abbd. 37 

' Which, path promises to be softest to my 
footsteps ? ' " 

Then he read some modest-eyed verses that 
he had addressed to the first violet that peeped 
up in his garden in February. I discovered a 
few leaves of his. love poesies, for, notwithstand- 
ing his enmity to woman, he often fondles Cupid 
in his metres. And when one of his madrigals 
ended with "Et mourir de ne pas mourir" 
(And die because one cannot die), I exclaimed 
that it was worthy the lines of Oronte in " Le 
Misanthrope " : — 

" Belle Philis, on desespere, 
Alors qu'on espere toujours." 

The difierentiation of friendship and love 
ofi'ered by another of these poems wedded my 
memory :— 

" Friendsliip — one soul of which two hearts have each a 
half. Love — one heart inhabiting one soul." 

Of all his poems I have heard, only one was 
not an offertory on a sentimental or sublime 
theme. This one was dedicated to a certain 
countess, whom the Abbe had formerly known 
when she was always clothed in black. It 
recounts that when he was walking along 
the street one day, she drove past arrayed in 



-38 Paris Days and' Evenings. 

brilliant stuffs. She acknowledged his salutation 
in an indifferent manner, whence this verse. It 
revealed the unpleasant fact that she was haughty 
and a redoubtable has hleu ; and in these last 
lines the Abbe condescended to take a mortal's 
revenge : 

" Qaoique vous en fassiez, 
Vous serez toujours laide, 
Et pedantesque et raide."- 

(For, whatever you do, you will always be 
ugly, pedantic, and stiff.) 

His own rhymes finished, then came of course 
his recitations of Hugo, and we soared aloft on 
expanded wing among the heights of "Les 
Contemplations." Toward five o'clock a faint 
rap at his door meekly announced that the 
vesper hour was a;pproaching. We went down 
to the fruit and flower garden which lies in front 
of the long white fagade of the chateau. It was 
laid out in the Lenotre fashion a hundred and 
fifty years ago. The Abbe, with his fat hands 
sanctimoniously folded athwart his abdomen, led 
my nervous, zigzag, secular steps quietly and 
minutely along the straight and narrow gravelled 
walks hedged with vine-trained fruit trees. 
Flowers weighted the air with dense incense in 
this virginal retreat. Here and there I caught 
a glimpse of some self-communing nun slowly 



/ ' - ' My Abyy ■ . . . 39, 

eclipsing into a quincunx, or winding her way: 
leisurely- in intricately intersecting and closely 
elipped alleys lined with cool shrines and 
stations of the cross. Then the Abbe accom- 
panied me to his private gate, and ..closed me 
out into the gray-walled street with his usual 
warm hand-shakino;s and his fervent '" Au revoir 
— a bientot." 

And as I walked back to Paris along the gray 
highway, with the vesper bells chiming in my 
ears, I thought how widely different this Breton 
and priestly temperament w^as from any I had 
ever intimately known ; how far it was separated 
from me by race, and time, and life itself; and 
yet how near it seemed ; how fully it belonged 
to the Middle Ages with its faith, romantic 
emotions, and imagination ; and how it made 
for the love of humble peace and tenderness, 
with its " II faut etre doux envers soi-meme." 

Here was a living example close to my 
consciousness of the manner in which one can 
be absorbed away from the earth and up into 
celestial realms, and can repose on the bosom 
of the Beyond. The Abbe has shown me a 
velvet, dow^iy soul in the traditional Catholic 
sense. He has shown me how infinitely sweet 
it is for a priest to let himself float softly, and 
yield all to the caresses of his religion. He 



40 Paris Days and Evenings. 

lias illustrated for me how one, in the old and 
true Christian meaning, can be nothing, do 
nothing, have nothing, and still be happy, and 
pass his years in praising God for His innumer- 
able gifts and blessings. 



A Great Fashion House. 

The two proprietors of tliis fashion house in the 

Eue lead the easiest of business lives. 

They are not to be seen here until about two 
o'clock in the afternoon. The senior gentleman 
sells four or five robes as his daily task, and 
then goes over to his club for repose. He 
returns about six o'clock to consult the totals 
of the day's traffic, and if they are satisfactory, 
he smiles and is full of compliments to every 
one. 

The prosperity of the firm is due to the junior 
member, because he conceives and creates the 
styles launched from these doors. His designs 
display variety, daring, and grace, and are 
reputed nowadays to be the most chic of all 
those afloat in Paris. For this reason the house 
has reached, within a few years, an annual 
aggregate of ten million francs of sales, and 
employs within its walls five hundred persons. 
This gentleman prepares in February his models 



42 Paris Days and Evenings. 

for the warm season, and in August he groups 
his fashions for cold weather. Thus his apart- 
ment in winter is decked in summer goods, and 
in midsummer it is clothed in furs and thick 
hibernal stuffs. He is always three months 
ahead of the world at large. Very likely no 
man in France is_ so flattei'ed as he byjadies. 
Princesses, wealthy heiresses, actresses, daily 
rehearse before him their admiration of his 
taste, and give evidence of how essential he is 
to their mundane successes and happiness. 
' The desperate means embraced by some 
women, whose purses are lean, to get without 
eost a robe devised by him expressly for them 
is illustrated by the case of a- person who 
recently wrote him that she had a rather grace- 
ful figure and pretty face (" joli minois ") which 
.perhaps might suggest to him new combinations 
in gowns. For, of course, the varying _ female 
types are indispensable to the quest of novelties 
in dress. He sent her word in response that he- 
should be pleased to "contemplate her physi- 
ognomy." When she arrived, he saw at a glance 
that she did not possess a sufficient beauty or 
grace to be an inspiration to him, so he politely- 
foiled, her attempt to procure a toilet for nothing 
by- affecting not- to understand precisely, what 
she desired of him. . ^ - ■ ... ^ -^' 



A Great Fashion House. 43 

About the first of August, when he begins to 
think of his autumn and winter designs, repre- 
sentatives of wholesale establishments show him 
-samples of their new materials — silks, woollens, 
embroideries, pearls. He studies the samples, 
forms his general conceptions, and sends for the 
"living mannikins." All is done in private, so 
tliat even the personnel may be surprised. A 
few days pass, and some afternoon he suddenly 
opens the door of his atelier, and twenty-five 
living models, arrayed in costumes never seen 
before,^ file out and through the salons, while 
he observes the efi"ect his latest creations produce 
cupon the employees. This is his jour cle 
^ernissage, for, like a painter, he is an artist 
in colours and forms. Buyers from foreign 
lands — Eussia, - Spain, the United States — are 
the first to revel in these virgin patterns. It is 
not until the end af September that the French 
customers appear on the scene. 

Of the five hun^lred women employed here, 
about one hundred receive regular salaries, and 
are breakfasted and dined at the expense of the 
firm on the fifth floor of the building. The 
cuisine- is not -without pretensions-. These 
salaried employees diVe somewhat free to come 
and go during the <iay, as their hours are not 
specially watched. . The other four hundred are 



44 Paris Days and Evenings. 

paid usually by the hour. The doors are open 
to them daily at nine o'clock, and those who 
have not reported by five minutes later lose a 
half day's wages. Fancy the spectacle of four 
hundred women and girls crowding each morning 
before an entry in one of the principal streets 
of Paris. The clientele begins to arrive at ten 
o'clock and does not leave before seven. For- 
merly the hours of the em'ployees were very 
severe. The new law interdicts night work 
after nine o'clock. Night watchers are apt any 
evening to make a tour of a business place in 
the French capital, and the proprietors who 
violate this statute are subject to a heavy fine, 
and to imprisonment if they persist in trans- 
gressions. A permission on papier timbre to 
exceed the statute hours can be obtained from 
a commissaire de police for the circumstance, if 
there is now and then a rush of trade. 

Twelve men tailors are employed — Germans, 
Austrians, Italians, and one Frenchman. The 
house finds the native workman too exacting. 

The personnel has all fete days free, besides a 
fortnight's vacation in summer during the morte 
saiso7i. At the fete of Saint Catherine {25th 
November) a dinner is given here by the firm — 
a fine repast irrigated copiously with champagne, 
and followed by a sauterie (a hop). The girl 



A Great Fashion House. 45 

who is nearest the age of twenty-five is adorned 
with a bonnet ("coifi"ee d'un bonnet"), and becomes 
the butt of the company in accordance with the 
familiar French expression for old maidenhood — 
coiffer Sainte Catherine. Naturally, on this occa- 
sion, there is much disguising of ages. Only 
the hundred salaried employees are present ; it is 
a dinner and a ball for women. The proprietors 
and the manager, however, appear at the foot of 
the stairs to see the ladies file up to the banquet 
table — " voir la montee au diner " ; and, during 
the dance, the seven or eight town agents 
(placiers) of the house are admitted. A few of 
the gayest of the girls disguise themselves in 
piquant costumes, and the frolic toward the close 
becomes somewhat dishevelled. 

The day after New Year's, an afi"ectionate 
custom is rigorously observed. Each salaried 
person must then pay her respects to the two 
proprietors and to the manager, and let them 
kiss her. The hundred employees repair to the 
store about ten o'clock in the morning, and are 
kissed by the junior member of the firm and 
the manager. They then wait until two 
o'clock for the senior proprietor, who drives 
down here with his wife. This gentleman and 
his lady receive the hundred people, one at 
a time. He kisses each employee, and she 



/\6 Paris Days and Evenings^ 

kisses' Madame, who presents her with "a 
package of iced chestnuts (marrons glacSs) as 
shfe gives way to one of her mates — "et:la:: 
corvee 'est acheve," to. quote the consecrated" 
phrase of the personnel. , . _ 

The "living m-annikins" are tall, well-propor- 
tioned young women, with waists not larger than. 
19^ inches, and with an elegant gait. Two or 
three of them have 18|-inch bodices. From 
morning until night, day after day, they do 
nothing but don robes and promenade through 
the apartments before the clientes. Usually they 
pass but once back and forth past the purchaser, 
thus offering the front and the back view of a 
toilet. One of these ' ' mannikins " is very blond 
and pretty, and disports to advantage in matinee^, 
deshahilUes, laces, and pale stuffs. Such 6n- 
semhles harmonise deliciously on her and ravish 
the cliente, who perhaps does not hesitate to 
order a similar pattern without reiBecting how 
much her own complexion and figure differ from 
those of the " mannikiii." She is apt to be dis- 
appointed when she essays the gown at home, 
and probably will return -and emphasise how it 
fails to please her and her friends. If she is a 
valuable cliente, the dress will be taken back, 
the loss ^Docketed, and another toilet clustered 
for her. If she is not a good customer, she. will 



A Great Fashion. Hoicse. 47 

not succeed in making ^ any one comprehend her 
complaints or wishes. 

• Seven or eight of the twelve vendeuses (sales- 
women) are of a certain age. The youngest is 
about twenty-two. Tlieir income is handsome, 
for they have, besides their salaries, a percentage 
on the^cost of -all the articles they sell. 
' The essayeuses (the women who fit the robes) 
abuse the, clientes freely, for the customer knows 
that she is wholly at the mercy of the essayeuse 
for the triumph of her costume. A rendezvous 
is arranged between them. At the hour named 
the lady will enter a salon dessayage, and then 
wait an hour or two while the essayeuse idles in 
her atelier, or runs personal errands about town. 
AVhen at last she concludes to appear, she easily 
disarms by a smile the lady in waiting, who, for 
that matter, is ready to endure almost anything 
in order to have a prettier sleeve than that of 
Madam X — - — , which is so much admired in the 
Bois. 

The foreign clientele is, in the main, the most 

profitable. Mrs Vanderbilt averages yearly 

eighty divers^robes, cloaks, capes, and what 
not — at a total cost of about 50,000 francs. 
-Her evenino; dresses run from 1200 to 1500 francs 
each. A Frenchwoman pays by far the largest 
bills. She spends here 180,000 francs a year 



48 Paris Days and Evenings. 

for robes, mantles, and laces. She is said to affect 
styles of her own, and to present, instead of 
taste and diic^ merely an unusual display as a 
toiletted woman, being too elegantly dressed not 
to be taken for what she is — a person of an 
irregular station in life. 

The fashions are advertised by the actresses, 
and particularly by the demi-niondaines ; but of 
course at their own real or intended expense. 
The cost of their average costume is 700 francs. 
The demi-mondaines are the first to come out 
with the new designs. As Paris leads the styles, 
and as the courtesan leads them in Paris, the 
syllogistic conclusion is inevitable that the modes 
of the world are introduced by the femmes 
galantes. This, however, appears always to have 
been the case. 

Many great actresses and singers, who create 
enormous annual bills here, never pay, and are, 
therefore, a steady drain on the profits. Since 
these artistes in reality publish the house by 
promenading its toilets, it does not dare to pursue 
them legally, nor refuse to dress them when they 
come for a new toilet. One of them — an actress 
celebrated across both continents — regularly in- 
sists that the bill be sent her with each delivery 
of goods. Now and then she requests that her 
account be made up in full. The collector 



A Great Fashion Hottse. 49 

accordingly presents himself at lier hotel with 
the totals. She remarks that the additions are 
correct, then thanks him in such a way that he 
can only politely withdraw, and that is the end of 
the matter, until another series of her orders pro- 
vokes a repetition of the performance. She is 
the one person whose garbs the house tries on 
for her in her own home. All the other clientes 
come to the store. 

Another large source of loss is the costuming 
of plays, for a theatre has the best, and can pay 
but a modest sum. As a rule, the robes of a 
comedy cost this house 800 francs each, and it 
receives about 500. A play like "Madame 
Sans-Gene " is toilettecl at a great loss to the 
establishment that undertakes it, yet what an 
advertisement ! It must be remembered, too, 
that this is the only means of advertising- 
employed. There are no *' ads.," even in journals. 
These affairs of theatres are at the same time 
very troublesome. For instance, a noted French 
actress was playing in London last June, and 
suddenly became aware that her role robes, which 
had come from our house, were barely hanging 
together because of constant use. She tele- 
graphed for duplicate costumes to be composed 
and sent at once. Everything was turned up 
side down under the stress of the circumstance, 

P 



50 Paris Days and Evenings. 

and in tliree or four days an expediteur was on 
his way to London in charge of a fresh supply 
of toilets. 

Another instance. The same actress was on 
the bills at the Vaudeville. She wished to 
transfer to Brussels without losing a night. In 
the afternoon of the day before her departure 
she had tried . on the last gown of a new series, 
and not wishing to trust the carefulness of the 
house about delivering all the articles, they were 
transported to her loge that . evening, and she 
made the verifications there during the entractes. 
The next morning, after she had taken the train, 
it was discovered that the belt of one of the 
dresses had been left behind. A courier was at 
once despatched with it to Brussels, and arrived 
in time for the play. 

The spectacle of famous women to be seen in 
our establishment during the afternoon in the 
busy season is entertaining in many ways. In 
enters, perhaps, the Grand Duchess of Leuchten- 
berg, with her air de gendarme, as tha employees 
term it. She does not suff'er an instant's delay, 
and is difficult in all particulars. The actresses 
of the Comedie Franyaise do not often come here, 
for the prices are fantastic. Occasionally Madame 
Baretta- Worms maybe discovered at -a counter, 
always wearing a rare sweetness of face, and 



A Great Fashion Hottse. 51 

never making any noise or trouble. Slle is 
indeed as estimable as she is lovely, and displays 
more tender womanliness in her roles than any 
other actress in Paris. Seldom is Madame Bern- 
hardt to be vie wed- jn these haunts, but, when 
she appears, her vehicle is of such a bizarre 
make, and her page is dressed in such exotic 
extravaganzas of hue and cut, that a crowd of 
people are sure to gather at the door to see her 
dfive away. 

Eejane and her husband, M. Porel, are 
frequently to be met with here. Eejane acts 
and talks in private as on the stage, with her 
"Oh ben!" and " Quequ §a me fait?" and her 
Madame Sans-Gene manners. She is the em- 
bodiment of that good-hearted and loyal type 
called "the daughter of the people," and would 
certainly have been the wife of one of Napoleon's 
marshals had she lived in that day. 

Inrushes perhaps the tom&m6r-7?2a;'or of light 
opera in Paris — Jeanne Granier — with her mouth 
full of desperate news. Judic has sprained her 
ankle this niorning, and cannot sing at the 
Varietes to-night. Granier must replace her, 
and therefore has three dresses to try on this 
afternoon and a Spanish and an English song 
to learn. Some employee who knows Spanish 
giccompanies her to a salon cTessayage, and 



52 Paris Days and Evenings. 

"whispers" the words of the Iberian ballad to 
her while her garbs are fitted. Then another 
assistant, who speaks English, ascends to repeat 
to her the lines of her Enoflish sons; — " Mistair 
Brauwn — Came to tauwn — Who deed that?" 
In two hours she is done, and goes away to 
regale the public at the Variet^s with her three 
toilets and with her two character songs, of 
which she does not understand a word, to say 
nothing of the meaning. This will not prevent 
her, however, from rendering the ditties to per- 
fection. Once in a while an actor comes in to 
be corseted for a travesty. Imagine Baron being 
adjusted to a robe to represent Phryne ! 

It may be interesting to conclude by noting 
what some French employee in our establishment 
thinks of the taste in dress of the women of 
other nationalities. One of the ladies here has 
kindly favoured me with some of the results of 
her observations — impartial hien entendu. Of 
course she rightly holds that the Parisienne far 
surpasses all emulators for hon gout — true 
eleorance — in costumes. Next to her she ranks 
the Englishwoman who comes over every season 
in her "eternal" white dress, black gloves, and 
piebald hat, to make her selections. Like the 
Parisienne, she endeavours to please, to charm, 
with her gowns, and to appear to the best 



A G^^eat Fashion House. 53 

advantage under all circumstances. For instance, 
both are careful always to sit before a mirror in 
the salons here,, while their rivals of other races 
are quite heedless, or ignorant, of the effect of en- 
vironment, and are as apt to station themselves 
before a window, or a crude group of colours, as 
anywhere. The English lady, and notably the 
French lady, seem for ever conscious that some 
aesthetic masculine eye may be upon them. The 
Anglaise has a creditable desire for grace and 
lightness in her cuts of garment and in the 
ensemble of her toilet. Yet she is fond of many 
materials and many hues. The matchless success 
of the Franqaise, in comparison, is due not only 
to her superior instinct for grace and lightness, 
but to the relative simplicity and chariness in 
her harmonies and contrasts of textures and 
tints. 

The typical American lady who appears here 
insists on a variety of goods and a diversity of 
colour in her apparel. Her garbs must display 
ampleness, fullness, so that the observer may be 
struck by the quantity of variations, and hence 
the cost. Her aim apparently is to impress the 
general public with the evident expense rather 
than to appeal to the aesthetic sense of the few 
by tasteful and simple tones. Her knowledge of 
the art of shades and of what becomes her is 



54 Paris Days and Evenings. 

limited, for she does liot seem to take the 
trouble to study herself well in the glass. A 
designer prepares for her each season some 
models of robes containing a little menagerie of 
features, and presenting, accordingly, a kaleido- 
scope of colorations and materials. An un- 
initiated em-ployee will sometimes say to him : 
"Why did you invent such a horror of a dress \ 
It will not sell." " Wait and see. The first 
Americaine who comes in sautera dessus " (will 
snap it up). 

The Americaine — to follow still our informant 
— is not coijfee with care ; her hair is not well 
combed. Her ways are brusque and steely. 
The English lady is stiff in her attitudes and 
bearing, and the Americaine has a loud, harsh 
voice. But while the Parisienne and the 
Anglaise are tedious about coming to a con- 
clusion, and go away, return and hesitate, the 
Americaine makes up her mind quickly, and, 
once decided, that is the end of it. She is by 
far the best business woman of them all. "EUe 
ne se laisse pas rouler " (she does not let herself 
be imposed on). Being more energetic tlian the 
others, the Americaine is the most exacting 
about the time set, and apparently never has a 
moment to lose. She is constantly saying in her 
grating tones: '•' Now, mind you, if that dress 



A Great Fashion House. 55 

isn't there by twelve o'clock sharp to-morrow, 
you can keep it." 

The German lady prefers substantial stuffs — 
goods that last. Her habiliments are warm, 
heavy, solid, and have a domestic and economical 
look. She chooses crude colours, and likes 
masses of them^maroons. greys, yellows, 
greens. 

The Russian lady is cold, reserved, dignified, 
and very "just." She has an air of honorability 
and distinction, and her face a main, for she is 
nearly always a myope, adds to her courtly 
manner. She inspires respect and a certain 
loyalty. Her toilets are more severe than those 
of the other women — never chamarre. Her 
favourite colours are white and black — clear. 
Her style is "plat"; her garbs fall flatly 
about her, and give the effect of a rigid 
perpendicularity. 



A Breakfast Colloquy. 

Place — Avenue Kleber. Time — ISToon. 

The Orator— As I was just saying, America 
and Eussia are so immense that it is almost 
impossible for the French to surround them — to 
appreciate them. A Frenchman is fond of and 
accustomed to small things, because of his sense 
of precision. 

The Chicago Lady {being helped to fish) — 
And if colossal, then of a fragile symmetry like 
the Tour Eiffel 

The Cynical Guest — I never look at the 
Tour Eiffel without thinking how Simeon Stylites 
missed his chance by living fourteen hundred 
years too soon. 

The Orator — 1 have sometimes felt that 
Victor Hugo and Wagner should have belonged 
to some vast country. Victor Hugo scarcely 
had elbow-room here in France. He did not 
write his greatest verse until he began living on 
an island in the sea. 

The Cynical Guest — Oh, America is big 
enough — it's too big. Living in France destroys 



A Breakfast Colloquy. 57 

one's love for mere immensities. One half of a 
country is always being misgoverned for the 
benefit of the other half. The half west of the 
Mississippi will cut off from the east half some 
day. 

The Chicago Lady — Never ! Never ! That 
question w^as settled for ever thirty years ago. 
Chicago will hold all America together. I love 
large countries, large cities, large organisa- 
tions. 

A SoRBONNE ^T\]J)E'NT {an erudite of 7iinetee7i, 
with an Ovid in one pochet and a Tasso in 
another) — That is a Eomanesque feeling — a 
nineteenth century mode. 

The Oratoe, — In big countries and organisa- 
tions they say the individual is apt to be 
efi'aced. 

The Chicago Lady — The individual cannot 
be said to be effaced in America. On the 
contrary — — 

The Student — Nor in France. Who can be 
more independent than the average French 
working-man ? He is the synonym of personal 
liberty. 

Someone — The effacement of the individual 
is the vital principle of monarchism. 

The Orator — ^You mean as regards the lower 
and the middle classes, but not the aristocracy. 



58 Paris Days and Evenings. 

The efFacement of the individual is an illusive 
expression. 

Someone — Caste is effaced in France and 
accentuated in England. 

The Cynical Guest — Oh, everything is effaced 
to some extent. Take even the typical Irish- 
man — his nose is effaced if his mouth isn't. 

Someone — Haven't the most successful nations 
and religions been small ? — Creece ? — The 
Quakers ? 

The Cynical Guest — One gets worn out with 
great uniformities and regular symmetries and 
models. Who does not prefer nowadays indi- 
vidualistic, half-homely jDortraits by Aman Jean, 
rather than ideal types like Bouguereau's. 

A Young Lady [from. Boston, and studying 
painting in Paris) — Oh, I think Bouguereau is 
too perfectly lovely for anything. 

The Orator {taking a cutlet) — It is very true 
that, with respect to immensities, one is inclined 
to stop at the surface and be amazed at the 
enormity of the contours. Still, we must not 
overlook the fact tha.t, together with the con- 
tracting sense in the French — their proneness to 
solidarity — there is their tendency to ignore the 
interior — the inward. They have intelligence 
and art enough here for several countries, but 
the conscience is too often ignored — the grand 



A Breakfast Colloqtiy. 59 

and dignified personal emotions, the fullest moral 
significance. 

The Cynical Guest — The heart and the brain 
are eternal enemies. It is always said that 
Cambridge is the leanest town in America from 
the heart side, and at the same time the most 
intellectual. 

The Young Lady — How absurd ! — I never 
heard of snch a thing ! 

The Young Man from Iowa — Why, that's one 
of the proverbs in minor America — that part 
west of the Hudson. 

The Young Lady — Oh, the slander ! You 
people from the West are always trying to abuse 
us. You are so—" breezy," not to say — - 
(triumphantly) you always make me feel like 
parodying my favourite poem — 

" From the prairies I come to thee, 
On a blizzard shod with — soap ! " 

The Iowan — In denying the soft impeach — 

The Young Lady — But it's not the soft article 
I'm giving you. 

The Student — Was not Bayard Taylor from 
the West ? 

The Young Lady — Why no, he was from 
Pennsylvania. 

The Student — But was not that the West to 
you in Boston when he wrote that poem ? 



6o Paris Days and Evenings. 

The Young Lady — Well — really — I must 
confess that was before I was born. 

The Orator {laughing) — Why, our Iowa 
friend believes that Eden was in the Mississippi 
valley. 

The Iowan — No, in the light of our recent 
American events, I have transferred Eden over 
into Atlantis, and hold now that the city of Is 
off the Brittany coast was its metropolis. As 
Atlantis went down, this eastern continent came 
up, and Adam simply stepped across. 

The Orator — But that road which runs down 
and is lost in the sea in Cornouailles ? 

The Student — That road was only a Roman 
road. It was where the last of the Romans 
drove down in a chariot into the ocean and 
drowned himself. 

The Orator — Rather plausible, for a Roman 
never could do anything until he had built a 
road. 

The Cynical Guest — He must have lived in 
one of those palatial Roman villas which lined 
the western coast of France, and had hot and 
cold water all over his farm, so that he could 
raise peanuts and cranberries side by side. 

The Student — When they draiu Atlantis 
they will find a lot of things — the head of the 
Nile, for instance. Think of this from old Ovid 



A Breakfast Colloquy. 6i 

{whiip'pmg his Ovid out of his pocket) : " The 
frightened Nile ran and hid its head, nor can it 
yet be found." 

The Cynical Guest {forking a pickle) — It 
was evidently under the impression that it was 
an ostrich. 

The Student — Perhaps that was where the 
ostrich got the idea. 

The Oeator — Strange the French have not 
made more of that lovely legend of the city of 
Is. If the Germans had had it, they would 
have exploited it. 

Someone — Lalo composed an opera called 
"LeKoid'Ys." 

The ORATOR^The French poets, after all that 
has been said, are much more concerned about 
the existence of God than interested in legends. 
That should be said for their credit — their verse 
shows it. 

A Guest — Yes, I have just been reading 
sixteen hundred pages of Sully Prudhomme to 
iind out if he has any faith. I have come to 
the conclusion that he believes in Deity. 

The Orator— In his verse if you will, but 
not personally. I happened to meet him at 
a dinner not lono; a^o, and he was saving at the 
table : " I will tell you simply and frankly how 
it is — I cannot bring myself to believe in the 



62 Paris Days and Evenings. 

Christian Grod, because I cannot reconcile all the 
sufferings in this world with the thought of ^ a 
Heavenly Father." 

The Cynical Guest — The poets are like the 
politicians— they never write what they mean. 

The Orator — Speaking of the love of immense 
things, I admit there is a sort of barbarism in it. 
Yet there is the cathedral — what is so ennobling 
and truly magnificent as a Titanic cathedral ? 
How it draws one out and up! I say that the 
interior of the Gothic cathedral is one of the 
greatest boons to mankind — the Greeks never 
produced anything so sublime. Think of 
Amiens ! It is not the fagade — it is the sweep 
of the interior. The interior is the soul of the 
Gothic church. 

The Young Lady — Oh, I love church fagades. 
I could live for ever in a little room across the 
square from the fagade at Orvieto, and do 
nothing but look at it and drink Chartreuses 
from Val d'Ema. 

, The Student (eating Roquefort) — All those 
green, yellow, purple liqueurs. I see, you 
would match them off, as it were, against the 
pi^lychromy of the church front. 

The Cynical Guest — She means that that's 
the way she would drink in the colours of the 
facade. 



A Breakfast Colloquy. d-^ 

The Young Lady {cutting a pie) — If some 
people loved polychromy more, and polyphony 
less, what a repose there would be for the other 
inhabitants of earth. I mean just what I was 
s:aying. Whenever I saw that facade and sipped 
those Chartreuses, all medisevalism seemed to 
pass across my consciousness. 

The Cynical Guest — What refinement of 
defining ! I never heard it called the Middle 
Ages before. Usually it's called " snakes in the 
boots," or something of that sort. 

A Lady — Facades give me little satisfaction. 
They are so seldom correctly constructed — there 
is something wrong about the theory of them. 
I tried to make a study of them during the 
twelve years I lived in Italy, and they only 
appeared to grow more and more incongruous 
to me. Haven't architects practically given up 
the problem? Think of the new fayade at 
Florence, and that one of the Trocadero, which 
they abandoned in despair. What battles, 
wranglings, and discussions there have been 
over church fronts. 

The Cynical GtUEST — The trouble is, they 
don't put the fagade of the cathedral in the 
proper place, , What is the fagade to represent ? 
It is to express to Deity the. thought of humanity. 
Jt is for Deity and not for man, and therefore 



64 Paris Days and Evenings. 

it ought to be, not on one side of the church, 
but on the top, so that it may be seen from the 
skies. As it is, we — poor egotists — we put 
the handsomest part of the cathedral toward 
ourselves, and turn the roofs and the ugliest 
part to heaven. By having the facade on the 
top, too, men would not find fault with it nor 
war about it, because they could not see it. It 
would not disturb nor distress anybody. We 
would thus shift the responsibility on the archi- 
tects up in the azure realms, and let them fight 
it out. 

The Lady {laughing) — Oh, how ingenious ! 

The Cynical Guest — For that matter, a 
Gothic cathedral should be entered from under- 
neath the ground and under the dome, so that 
you would get nothing but the whole sweep 
upward. That is really the Gothic idea. As it 
is now, you enter at one end, and thus get the 
effect of length and level — the fatalistic effect 
proper to the Greek temple, rather than the soar- 
ing height which is the true Christian sensation. 

Someone — -A s^ood scheme to aret rid of the 
beggars at the front door. 

The Chicago Lady — And destroy the magni- 
ficent ceremonies at the high altar. 

The Orator — It's an idea that certainly 
should be crowned by the French Academy ; 



A Breakfast Colloquy. 65 

still, I'm afraid the underwriters would cancel 
their policies on the ground that the churches 
had been turned into fire-traps. 

The Young Lady — Oh, they don't have big 
fires in Europe. We are cursed with them in 
America. Just think of poor Boston. 

The Student — The French don't have fires in 
our way. They have big fires — they get them 
in their heads once in a while. What is a 
Commune but a big fire, only it burns in 
people's heads ? The result is the same. 

A Caller {sharing in the distribution of the 
black coffee) — Why don't they have insurance 
companies for hot-headed people ? You insure 
an edifice against fire — better insure us against 
the burning "patriot," who puts a torch 
to it. 

Someone [ii^onically) — Oh, we can't do without 
patriotism, and lots of it. The sentiment of 
patriotism is greater to-day than the sentiment 
of family. 

The Caller — The love of country has largely 
supplanted the love of God in the last fifty 
years. After a while the world will learn that 
a "patriot" is only an office-seeker in some 
form. People would laugh at a man who went 
about proclaiming how much he loved his father 
or his wife, yet we think it is a fine example of 



66 Paris Days and Evenings. 

courag;e and honour and self-sacrifice if he sjoes 
about proclaiming how he loves his country. 

The Cynical G-uest — It's but a fashion — it 
will pass, and with it the glorious and buxom 
desire to trounce other races; for it's merely a 
wholesale and a militant disdain of the rights 
and sensibilities of other nations. 

The Orator — Well, I don't know. If you 
do away with the sentiment of patriotism, what 
are you going to give us in place of it ? Uni- 
versal celestialness is entirely too far oif to be 
considered. Civilization all the way along has 
been built up on nothing if not the patriotic 
idea. The grandest points in history are those 
where the "national bias," as they callit, was — 
exaggerated, you would say. I am for progress 
as much as any one, yet I am frank to confess 
I'm a little like that old Presbyterian auntie : 
" No corsets — no hell — I don't' know what the 
world's comin' to ? " You take away religion, 
you take away the sentiment of family, you take 
away the sentiment of patriotism, and what 
is left ? — Anarchy ! — and that's precisely what 
we're getting to-day. 

The Cynical Guest — I don't see it in that 
way. On the contrary, it seems to me that 
anarchism is the perfection of this so-called 
patriotism. The anarchists are its logical result, 



A Breakfast Colloquy. 67 

for naturally they have come at length to feel that 
their country owes them something — a great 
deal — all — since its debt to the average citizen 
for his devotion, for his patriotism, is always 
emphasised in the furore of nationalism. 

The Caller — To magnify the claims and 
virtues of your own country is to minimise those 
of other countries. You have only to go a step 
further in some brains and make this notion 
a more individual one — give it a personal 
application — and you are apt to have an an- 
archist who, overvaluing his claims and virtues, 
and consequently undervaluiug those of society, 
thinks that his own nation or race is his debtor, 
and that, in the present organisation of things, 
he is being unjustly deprived of his dues. 

The Valet — The bicycles are ready in the 
court, msieurs , dames. 

The Student — Ho ! for Saint-Germain ! An 
ajyeritf on the terrace at five. 



At the Jardin des Plantes. 

{.July 1894.) 
In the Jardin des Plantes there is a cedar of 
Lebanon, ten feet in circumference, with its 
sublime branches benignantly outspread, as if in 
benediction of the surroundings. It was planted 
here on the top of a mound in 1735 by Jussieu, 
who brought it from Syria. Near it is a sun- 
dial with the motto : " Horas non numero nisi 
Serenas." The tree and the motto are all that I 
have come to care much for in this garden. 

o 

They seem so calmly, grandly full of the serene 
past ; they fill one so gratefully with the spirit 
of repose and of sweet dignity. 

The Jardin des Plantes is far away from 
modern Paris, and is apparently somewhat run 
down at the heel. One frequents it very little. 
I fancy its role has been greater than it is to-day 
in the theatre at large of knowledge, for with 
it are associated the names of Cuvier, Buffon, 
Bernard, Jussieu, and others — names that have 
marked long strides in the progress of science. 



At the Jar din des Plantes._ 69 

I was invited there yesterday by a young 

French friend, chief of the department of , 

to dine, and to see a python kill and swallow a 
big rabbit. It was a private exhibition, and at 
four o'clock, the hour appointed, seven or eight 
of us grouped around the serpent's cage. Do you 
know what a python is ? Neither did I. I mean 
that you have, as had I, only a vague idea that 
he is a large snake possessing the gift of embrac- 
ing opportunities. So I resorted to the " Britan- 
nica" just before I went, in order that I might 
not appear wholly anchorless in the sea of science 
down at the Jardin. The " Britannica" informed 
me that the python is to the old world what the 
boa is to the new ; consequently no pythons are 
to be found in the western hemisphere. There 
are five species of them, three native to Africa 
and two to Asia, all non-venomous ; kill their 
prey by crushing it in their coils ; adepts at 
swimming, climbing, and moving over the 
ground ; swallow everything head first, and 
always have something of a disagreeable time 
with the feathers or horns and hair. 

\Vell, here we were in the presence of a mag- 
nificent python. To be scientific, and therefore 
not to understate his dimensions, I will say that 
he must have been at least 15 feet long and at 
least 6 inches thick. I looked up at his sign, and 



7o Paris Days and Evenings. 

saw that he was of the species Molurus, and hence 
hailed from Asia. The keeper told us that he was 
good-natured, and never gave them any trouble. 
He was evidently anticipating the pleasure of a 
dinner, for he was curving about, and acting as if 
he were interested in life ; and this was not 
surprising, since he had ingulfed nothing for six 
weeks ! He swallows a repast once in six weeks ! 
How the Paris pensions would flourish if they 
had such guests 1 His neighbour had not bolted 
any food for thirteen months, and yet seemed 
lively. The best Dr Tanner record in this 
museum of reptiles, however, is that of a serpent 
that did not stinge anything solid for thirty- 
three months. Then he gulped down a meal — 
and died the next day of indigestion ! 

Finally a rabbit was brought in — a huge, fat, 
live rabbit. The cage door was opened, and he 
hopped in cosily, little suspecting, poor fellow, 
the horrible fate in immediate store for him. 
The python did not see him for an instant, but 
no sooner had he caught sight of his victim than 
he darted at him like a flash, seizing him in the 
rear by a hip, and instantly coiling around his 
body. The mutilated bunny cried out pitifully 
for a second, until his head was smothered in a 
coil. Altogether, it was a heartrending exhibi- 
tion that I should not wish to witness again. 



At the Jar din des Plantes. 71. 

In about three minutes the rabbit was dead, 
and the python knew it promptly. He did not 
wait many seconds before commencing the swal- 
lowing process. He searched for the head, experi- 
menting with his mouth to find it. The moment 
he decided which end was the head, he began 
the act of deglutition. This was interesting, 
for we would have wagered that this serpent 
could not ingurgitate this great rabbit — clothing, 
boots, and all. The attendants smiled at our 
incredulity, saying that on one occasion this 
snake had swallowed a small deer. He was fif- 
teen minutes in getting past the shoulders. I 
asked ni}^ friend : " How long will it take him to 
finish the exhibition — two or three hours ? " 
" About tw^enty-five minutes," he replied, to my 
astonishment, for I really fancied the snake had 
half a day's task before him. But it appears 
that once he rounds the shoulders he gulps down 
the rest of the body in three or four huge swal- 
lows. When the hind feet disappeared down 
the throat of our Moluriis, he raised his head 
high up and towards us, and seemed to smile in 
triumph over this coup de grace. 

The secret of his spacious capacity to sw^allow 
was clear to us when we saw the final course of 
the rabbit. The under part of the python is 
very elastic. While his upper, visible half does 



72 Paris Days and Evenings. 

not distend mucli, his lower half is capable of 
great dilatation. The mystery of his deglutitory 
power is then quickly understood when the 
shoulders of his victim vanish from view. The 
spectacle was not quite over, for the prey had to 
be shoved down to the stomach, which is located in 
the middle portion of the snake. So strong were 
his muscles that the rabbit was moved rather 
rapidly to his destination. The attendants 
threw in a woollen blanket, pushed in the 
python's bath tub, and he was left to be undis- 
turbed for a month and a half. 

My scientific friends called everything by its 
Latin name, and Latin was floating about so 
freely in the atmosphere that I began to rum- 
mage among my memories of six years of Virgil, 
Horace, and the other old Roman scientists. All 
that I could dust off and display on this sudden 
notice consisted of the first sentence of Csesar, 
and of two or three common expressions that 
any one would know who had not wrestled with 
that bull-necked language of antiquity. I could 
not work in the Csesar very well under the cir- 
cumstances, and I endeavoured to slip in my 
other phrases in a jocose way like this : Coming 
to some animal having small horizontal stripes 
down his back (as if they were meant for noting 
memoranda), or to one having nothing apparently 



At the Jar din des Plantes, 73 

but a tremendous mouth, I would ask my friend : 
" What is this index rerum f " ''Where did you 
get that omnium gatherum f " 

We went up to his apartment. He and his 
wife live in the midst of all these reptiles. 
There are reptiles below them and on all sides of 
them. Having just seen so many snakes, I was 
not quite at ease, and kept half glancing around 
to be sure that a stray serpent were not making 
for me with his head high in the air. To add to 
my secret discomfort, I chanced to pick up a 
journal on the salon table, and to let my eye fall 
on an account of a duel d serpent in India be- 
tween a British captain and a British lieutenant. 
A venomous snake was put in a dark cage in a 
dark room. The captain entered on one side, the 
lieutenant on the other. Both were weaponless. 
They stood there, in terrible suspense and hor- 
ror, waiting to be bitten. Ten minutes passed 
and the lieutenant gave a cry ; he had been 
bitten. The captain, almost mad with fright, 
quickly made his escape. His hair had turned 
white. They tried to save the life of the lieu- 
tenant, but he died in an hour or tw^o after 
indescribable suffering. 

The special object of our little dinner I dis- 
covered was to make a match between two 
friends of the family. The husband had a French 



74 Paris Days and Evenings. 

clmm who wished to get married, and his wife's 
most intimate friend wished to get married, so 
they had thus been brought together for the first 
time in cold blood, in the practical Parisian way. 
However, to relieve this particular occasion, I 
was evidently intended to serve as a buffer. 
The young lady was docile and timid, and con- 
scious of being on parade. The young gentleman 
was as celestial as possible. Both were engaged 
in discreetly venturing prosaic glimpses at each 
other now and then, to ascertain if they were 
well enough pleased formally. During the even- 
ing they managed casually to compare brief 
notes on their preferences as to weather, and the 
hostess skilfully extracted from the young man his 
ideas about cooking, so that her companion might 
see how well it Avould go to cuisiner for him. 

The weather and cooking are about the only 
topics disturbed nowadays in France during such 
ceremonies, for every one is republican- and 
catholic. There remains, though, the question of 
dot. I heard my friend saying to his friend : 
" Well, don't you think she is amiable ? She is 
so gentille, and has a dot of 25,000 francs — a 
pretty good sum for these times." And the 
other seemed about ready to respond : " I'll 
meditate over it, and decide in a day or two." 

This is, you know, tte typical manner in which 



At the Jar din des Plantes. 75 

it is done in France. You may remark : "Ob, 
how materialistic and ridiculous ! No courtship, 
no being alone together, no days of blissful un- 
certainty, no sleepless nights, no boat-rides, no 
bonbons, no Chopin, no rushing of hearts to- 
gether in a loge over 'Du lieber Schwan.' " Our 
French host would respond : " Yes, yet think of 
the time and bank bills saved ! The money I 
would have wasted on drives and theatres to make 
Marie believe I was prosperous, she and I have 
put into our home, and enjoy it day after day. 
No lovers- qaiarrel si on our plan, no dreadful wait- 
ings, no broken hearts, no dog after your boot-leg 
over lier father's terraces, no love-letters to be 
brought up before you in court ! " 
- The windows of the salon looked down on a 
small ponded inclosure where fourteen big and 
little crocodiles. wer6 energetically at " work 
doing nothing. It was proposed that we should 
go down and make 'theiln-..laugh. Do you know 
the difference between an alligator and a croco- 
dile ? Neither did I. Still, it is not a difficult 
cjuestion. To s]3eak broadly, an alligator appears 
to be a crocodile whose snout got stepped 
on in the rush and sputter of the sixth day. 
When we reached the pond, there were four or 
five big fellows, ten feet long, lying on the 
ground. We punched tEem in the sides, shook 



76 Paris Days and Evenings. 

hands with them, tickled them under their chins, 
and jerked them by their tails. The animals 
merely made little hissing noises, and good- 
humouredly fluted the white ivory outlines of 
colossal smiles. 

For my part, I was both amazed and de- 
lighted at this mute crocodile jocularity. I had 
never dreamed of finding these animals so jovial 
and gamesome, and I asked my friend : " But 
how about those famous crocodile tears ? " The 
scientific reply is something like this. " There is 
a basis of truth for that old fiction — at least, 
if one refers to snakes. It is now known that 
the eye of the serpent is protected from dust 
and danger by transparent eyelids, so that he 
goes about with them closed. There is, there- 
fore, no dust on the surface of his eyes, and no 
need of tears to wash them off. Nevertheless, 
fhe tear-gland is not reduced in size ; on the 
contrary, it is unusually large — often three 
times larger than the whole eye. The explana- 
tion of this is that the tear-gland has lost its 
connection with the eye, and opens through the 
tear canal into the mouth, thus adding to the 
huge supply of secretions required whenever 
the snake swallows game. Hence one may say 
that a reptile sheds — pours — tears over his 
victim, but they are false tears, put to a very 
material use." 



At the Jar din cies P /antes. yy 

After a while we heaved the crocodiles into 
the pond, and went into the turtle lot to kick 
over the turtles. With one of them, however, 
we did not make great headway, for he weighed 
four hundred pounds, and was half as big as 
a dining-table. Then it came time to go, and 
the young lady was confided to my care, much 
to my surprise, because I had never seen the 
French rule broken, namely, young unmarried 
women must be chaperoned as late as sixty 
years. I was highly gratified at this display of 
confidence ; still, in thinking about it to-day, 
I conclude the real reason was simply that 
the young lady lived an hour and a half 
away by omnibus, and my sensible Parisian 
friend and his wife did not wish to travel so 
far last night. 

J 



The Decline of the Boulevard 
des Italiens. 

{December 1 893.) 

The boulevard that runs froni the Place de 
r Opera to the Rue Richelieu still seems nearest 
the centre of the French world. It may be 
designated as the Boulevard des Italiens. The 
Rue de la Paix is only the shopping street 
of Paris. Its fame is in its dresses and its 
jewelry. Worth and Doucet are there side by 
side, the former furnishing better stuffs, and the 
latter clisjjlaying more style, more chic, and 
therefore having a larger Parisian trade than 
his rival. 

Around the Boulevard des Italiens, by con- 
trast, are grouped many great characteristic 
institutions and associations. The Temps is 
here with its cold bosom and admirably en- 
lightened seriousness. Its office is plain, lean, 
and frigid. Its windows are decorated with 
maps for the edification of the passer-by. Now 
it is a map of Cochin-China, and then it is a 
chart of Afric's wastes. Usually there is also a 




THE DECLINE OK THE EuULEVAKD DES ITALlENd 



The Decline of the Boulevard des Italieiis. 8 1 

military diagram showing the fortifications, or 
armed forces, in certain regions of France, Italy 
or Germany. 

There are one or two other leading journals 
on the street, and a few steps away are found 
several newspaper homes. Among them are the 
Gaulois and the Figaro. The Figaro building 
has a very artistic and ornate fagade, embellished 
with a statue representing the immortal Figaro 
of Beaumarchais. On one side of the entry 
is inscribed the line : " Without the liberty to 
censure there is no eulogium that flatters. 
Only little men fear little paragraphs." On the 
other side are traced the oft-quoted words of 
Figaro : " Praised by some, blamed by others, 
mocking the fools and braving the wicked, I 
make haste to laugh at ever^^thing — for fear of - 
having to weep." 

The Boulevard des Italiens is well provided 
with theatres and souvenirs of theatres. There 
are the Opera, the Vaudeville, the Nouveaut^s, 
the plot of ground where the Opera Comique 
stood, and the site of the old Grand Opera. 
In the vicinity are the Varietes, the BoufFes 
Parisiens, the Palais Eoyal, the Gymnase, the 
Conservatoire, and also the square of the old 
Theatre Italien, which filled such a corner in the 
glory of Paris from 1841 to 1870. 



F 



82 Paris Days and Evenings. 

The celebrated banking lane, known as Rue 
Laffitte, branches off this boulevard, and in it is 
the Eothschild institution of Paris. Back of the 
Eothschild bank there is a large empty space 
well walled up. People who pass along the wall 
are apt to rap it with their knuckles. This 
will bring good luck they say. Rue Laffitte 
is named after the banker of whom the pin story 
of France is told. Every country has a tale 
about a millionaire and a pin. Laffitte, then 
a poor young man, applied without success at 
a banker's for a position. As he went out 
through the open court in his disappointment, 
he saw a pin, carefully picked it up, and filed it 
away under his lapel. The banker chanced to 
observe this evidence of banking capacity, had 
him called back, offered him a clerkship, and in 
due time gave him his daughter, the bank, and 
everything that young Laffitte deigned to ask for, 
under the influence of the pin's charm. 

Although every race has its Laffitte, and his 
biography is essentially the same, the French 
Laffitte distinguished himself in one way. 
Whenever he indulged in a Vatel dinner on the 
Normandy coast, the fish came from Chevet's in 
Paris, that he might be sure they were fresh and 
edible. This was rather severe on the sea towns 
of north-western France, but then the sea has 



The Decline of the Boulevard des Italiens. 'i'X) 

never figured much with the French in any 
fashion. It has never entered into the soul of 
the nation as in England and Holland. 

One of the streets parallel to Rue Laffitte is 
Rue du Helder, where resided one of Pere Goriot's 
daughters, you remember. And near by is the 
Rue Le Peletier where Orsini attempted to assas- 
sinate Napoleon III, The Rue Le Peletier and 
the Rue Laffitte are well known for their pic- 
ture shops. For that matter, all these streets are 
familiar to the connoisseurs of French painting. 

Across the way from the Vaudeville is the 
house where Rossini lived and died. Here, 
divinely lazy and gormand, he cooked his own 
flats and regaled himself with macaroni and 
honsmots — a mixture, as he was called, of 
Punchinello and Olympian Jove. He gave 
" Guillaume Tell" to the world in 1829, and 
during thirty-nine years thereafter, and until his 
death, he revelled in a fat and greasy indolence. 
"William Tell" was the first, and remains one of 
the greatest, of the Romantic operas produced in 
France. I happened, only the other day, to be 
reading, in the private foyer of the Op^ra, the 
poster of its initial performance. It ran like 
this: " First representation of William Tell. By 
Giacomo Rossini. Monday, April 3rd, 1829. 
All the seats being taken, the bureaux will not 



84 Paris Days and Evenings. 

be open. Dance : Miles. Noblet, Legallois, 
Montessu, Taglioni. Singers : Messieurs, etc.; 
Mesdames, etc. Begin at 7." 

Switzerland is embalmed in this opera, and 
this is why it yet lives. Its inspired overture 
is in the repertory of all orchestras and bands. 
If one is idling; about the Eossini house of a 
summer evening, he will likely hear a melody 
piped in the souvenir of the ranz des vaches, 
and the land of the legendary Tell will rise 
before his mental vision as a fine Swiss 
mountaineer saunters b}^ with three black goats. 
He is whistling a Canton air to tell people that 
night is falling, and that it is time to buy goats' 
milk. I have tried once or twice to follow him 
home, curious to see if he had a chalet, full of 
straw and tin cans, tucked away in the middle 
of Paris ; but he always keeps strolling on, and 
the goats know the streets like their owner's 
pocket. 

Another noted man, a neighbour of Eossini, 
lived on a corner of the Boulevard des Italiens — 
Louis Blanc. He had apartments over Tortoni's, 
and every morning came downstairs there for 
his coffee. 

The characteristic feature of this boulevard 
has been the cafe, for here are the Cafe Anglais, 
the Cafe Eiche, and the Maison Doree. Here, 



The Decline of the Boulevard des Italiens. 85 

too, was Tortoni's, for it nailed up its door last 
summer because its customers had grown so few. 
It was long renowned, especially under the 
Second Empire, for its ices, and for the witty 
fraternity of journalists, litttrateurs, and artists 
who haunted its historic perron of three steps, 
and its gilded little rooms. In later times, its 
most faithful liahitue was Aurelien Scholl, the 
jDopular Paris journalist and wit. It is said that 
he brushed away a furtive tear last June when 
the cafe closed. In commenting on its history, 
he remarked : " The proprietor retires with no 
reproaches to fate. He defended butter against 
oleomargarine, beef consomme against Liebig's 
Extract, early fruits against preserves, wine 
against beer, cognac against rectified alcohol, but 
the contest had become hopeless. The most 
absurd aperients persisted in disputing with each 
other for the favour of a blase public," 

Here the note is struck. The French cafe is 
a doomed institution. The Boulevard des 
Italiens and the traditional white and gold cafe 
were in the height of their glory under Napoleon 
III., and have since been in a decline. In a few 
years the boulevard that extends from the Opera 
to the Madeleine will be the heart of the capital. 
Paris has ever been moving west from the 
Bastille to the Bois. The famous companions of 



86 Paris Days and Evenings. 

Tortoni will give up the struggle or be trans- 
formed into brasseries before long, for the 
brasserie is becoming the king of the boulevards, 
and German beer is triumphing over French 
wine.^ 

We recall the Teutonic prophecy of Gautier 
delivered before 1870 in a droll mood. The 
incident is one of the most amusing in French 
biographical literature. Marc-Monnier related it 
as follows in the Journal des Debats, in 1883 : 
"As for M. Theophile Gautier, on whom I 
thought it my duty to call, I found him stretched 
out on a divan, a Greek cap on his head, and 
three cats on his abdomen. As he made no 
movement on my entering, I asked if I were 
disturbing his meditations. ' Not at all,' he said ; 
' I only work Sundays at the printing office ! Sit 
down if you wish — if you prefer to stand, do 
just as you do at home.' Having thus put my- 
self at m}^ ease, the poet of ' Albertus ' did not 
inquire who I was, but talked the whole time, 
firing off thoughts of all colours. The three 
cats, which he did not cease to caress, accom- 
panied him with a purring almost monastic. 
He talked of everything, and of a 'little more 

1 Since this was written, the Cafe Eiche has been turned 
into a palatial hrassene, and Bignon's has closed its doors. 



The Decline of the Boulevard des Italiens. %"] 

than every tiling' — this was one of his mots — 
above all, of the despicable business (chien de 
metier) he was forced to follow — -to make copy 
for the bourgeois/ Kfeuilleton every eight days 
about absurd plays and pieces ! And this was 
necessary in order to live ! They paid him more 
for an ell of buckram than for a handful of gems! 
"In his first youth (he was only in his third) 
he had been obliged to draw up prospectuses ; it 
was in this way that he had learned French. A 
man who has never drawn a prospectus will 
never know how to spell. For that matter, 
what is the use of writing ? Eacine ovAj suc- 
ceeded in composing one fine line : — 

' La fiUe de Minos et de Pasiphae.' 

There has never been but one poet in France — 
Victor Hugo. Have you read 'Les Chatiments'? 
It is full of inexact things, but it is of such a 
phosphorescence that in nineteen centuries there 
will remain nothing else of all the reign of my 
emperor. Voild posterity, my good man ! 
Tacitus was probably a poor devil to whom Nero 
refused the equivalent of a bureau de tabac. 
This is why Tacitus made copy and Nero was a 
monster. It is the writers who create events ; 
nothing has ever come to pass in the world. 
For that matter, in nineteen centuries there will 



8.8 Paris Days and Evenings. 

only be G-ermans ; but, when there shall only be 
Germans, they will become so bored that they 
will offer a premium to those who will fabricate 
' Latins.' For the moment, there is only Hugo 
— and Baudelaire : Les Fleuvs du Mai, ferociously 
piebald and spotted, of a purple resembling con- 
gealed blood, or of a chlorotic white, exhaling 
acrid, penetrating, vertiginous perfumes." 

The cafe is associated with the royal and 
imperial glory of France, and to see it going out 
of existence accentuates the feeling of the 
traveller who visits Versailles and St Cloud, and 
leaves France with a gentle yet persistent im- 
pression that the land of the Parisians is in a 
mild state of decadence. Of course French art 
and fashions will reign supreme, and the French 
will always teach nations taste, delicacy, 
lucidity. It would be a heavy world, indeed, 
were the French to be taken out of it. An 
ancient Greek would surely choose to be a Gaul 
if he were to be born into our modern world 
and had a choice of race. 

But remark the decline in our day of the many 
things that have borne the mark of French 
distinction. There is the decline in the art of 
international diplomacy, for instance, and in the 
French custom of effacino; girls into the back- 
ground, by calling them all Marie, and having 



The Decline of the Boulevard des It aliens. 89 

them wear cotton in their ears, so that you can- 
not individualise them any more than you can 
pease. In the domain of practical sciences, 
where the next great future for civilisation seems 
to lie, the French are, and will ever be, hopelessly 
behind. Trade, colonisation, and electricity are 
not to their liking. France manufactures what 
the most civilised people want in their refine- 
ment and eifeminac}^, and not what new races 
need, so that French colonial territories are for 
display, and not for the necessities of secular and 
racial expansion. 

The decadence of France will scarcely be 
noticeable. A very wealthy people in an exceed- 
ingly fertile land, and with the capacity to pro- 
vide so much that other leading nations desire, 
the more they advance in the scale of artistic and 
polished progress, the French will visibh^ hold 
their own for a lono; time. Their national debt 
is immense and increasing materially. The 
present tremendous drain of men, money, and 
time, for the sake of national glor}^, must tell on 
the race as the decades go on. However, under 
the sweet cheer of a promised revenge, they 
apparently mean to persist in this course at all 
cost, and feel that they have had sufficient woe 
without being called on to give up the armed 
thought of getting back Alsace and Lorraine — 



90 ' Paris Days and Evenings. 

in other words, without abandoning their taste 
for destruction. They are something like the 
Arkansaw man who is reported in the New York 
Nation to have announced : " God knows I've 
had trouble enough without putting water in my 
whisky." 



Paris Days at Dieppe. 

{September 1893.) 

Dieppe, in summer, is the Boulevard des Italiens 
extended to the coast. You come here to keep 
in Paris rather than for a strand and the sea. 
The town, with its theatre trod by the Coquelins, 
Galipaux, and other favourites of the metropolitan 
boards, and with its arrivals and news hot from 
the boulevards of the capital every hour, is only, 
in so far as it is a festival resort, a kind of 
brackish microcosm of the capital. 

To paraphrase a saying of Alphonse Karr, 
whose memor}^ mixes its Attic flavour with the 
brine of the Normandy coast : " At Dieppe, one 
does not like to bathe, but one likes to have 
bathed." This beach would never caress the 
sentimentality of a Madame Bovary. Nothing 
could well be more disagreeable to a romantic 
soul, strung up in high despair, than to drown 
unnoticed amid all this littoral commonplaceness. 

And still it was at Dieppe that the Duchess of 
Perry, whose Neapolitan blood was ever burning 



94 Paris Days and Evenings. 

througli her veins, first sketched and disported 
the fashion of the surf in France, and thus 
enabled the home of Ango and Duquesne to 
reassume something of its ancient prestige and 
glory. The Duchess passed her summers here 
from 1824 to 1829. The print of the footstep 
of her little daughter, the Duchess of Parma, 
has been carefully preserved in situ on the 
Tortoni-like perron of the ducal mansion, and is 
affectionately pointed out to the visitor by the 
Dieppois. One can barely decipher the inscrip- 
tion : " Son premier pas est pour Dieppe et 

pour Dieppe un bienfait. Mademoiselle le 

4 Septembre 1827 " (Her first step is for Dieppe, 
and for Dieppe a benefit). 

Are the English, who surge across here in the 
season, attracted by the spectacle of the French 
rehearsing, as it were, the novelty of the bath ? 
For the French do not appear to be great 
washers of themselves, A typical Parisian does 
not reckon balneation among the irresistible 
joys and luxuries of life. He accepts and 
undergoes it because it is a civilised custom. 
People who are brought up in the Parisian 
l^oarding-schools and convents, where it is 
always announced with native complacency 
that a foot bath ("petit bain ") is aff'orded 
every fortnight, and a complete bath (" grand 



Paris Days at Dieppe. 95 

bain ") every montli, do not claim to exploit the 
cult of the bath to any noteworthy extent. The 
Greeks seem to have bequeathed their gift of 
light to the French and their habits of immer- 
sion to the English. The latter have fallen lot 
to the sombre colourings of medisevalism, and 
the former to its unwashedness. A Parisian has 
the traditional Eoman Catholic preference for 
incense and perfumes, and therefore for powder- 
puifs, rather than for water and soap. 

Some such hint of a thought is outlined in 
one's mind as he idles alons^ the white meao;re- 
ness of the cliffs here at Dieppe, and muses over 
its modest panorama. One remarks how the 
town divides into two parts. There is the 'plage, 
flanked on one side by tlfe stately row of white- 
faced hotels, and bordered on the other by the 
fringing waves. Then back of this is shoaled 
the small dull-coloured city itself, with vague 
memories of Italy in its vile arcades, and of 
Holland in a general way. Here the smell of 
fish stenches one's reveries, and seasick odours 
loaf about the street corners and attempt 
familiarities with weak stomachs. The only 
pleasure in Dieppe proper is St Jacques, dressed 
up in its hoary laceries of stone hewn after the 
most daring delicacies of Gothic patterns. 

Over the hill is Puys, sporting its tiny jewel of 



96 Paris Days and Evenings. 

a beach. Its two miniature heio;lits are crowned 
respectively with Lord Salisbury's villa and with 
the formidable embarkments and strange remains 
of some unknown " gallo-romain " camp, which 
mutely persists in defending its secrets from 
layman and archaeologist alike. Puys is known 
of the two Dumas. Fortunate did the lady con- 
sider herself who found the elder Dumas corked 
down long enough there to favour her album 
with some appropriate inscription like the 
following: "To embark on your career with a 
woman is to embark with a tempest, in which, 
however, she is the lifeboat." 

The centre and circumference of summer 
existence at Dieppe is the Casino, which 
furnishes the quotidian "events," and offers 
everything in the manner of entertainment that 
its guests can demand. There are many chil- 
dren on the beach who are fittingly rejoiced 
with Punch and Judy, feats of prestidigitation, 
and fireworks. An ambitious orchestra, con- 
ducted with more of the impetuosity of the 
Strausses than one is wont to see displayed in 
French band-masters, gives daily a round of 
inviting concerts. The performers love the 
flowery music of Ambroise Thomas, and delight 
the older Parisians with the faded sweetnesses of 
Auber. It is charming, late in the afternoons. 



Parts Days at Dieppe. 97 

to watch the diligent French mammas embroider- 
ing the dusk of Massenet's " Crepuscule " into 
their fancy-work as the twilight begins to steal 
in on the musicians. Every other night there is 
a ball, where deliciously-toiletted couples fan past 
you as they trace the airy circles of the waltz. 
The weather is still too warm to think of lacins^ 
up these evening parties in the corsets of 
cotillions. 

A.S one lies stretched out up here over it all on 
this sunny cliff, he can read, in the light of local 
interest, the amusing pages of the fumbling Jules 
Janin, with their memories of the renowned 
people who haunted, in other days, the vicinity 
of this minute wrinkle in the earth. He used to 
see a man tragically approaching the edge of the 
waves down there — an unfortunate soul, who had 
the air of saying : " Must I then precipitate my- 
self into this cold and filthy abyss ? " It was 
Meyerbeer — Music in person — who had come to 
take, tremblingly, some sea baths. He thus 
sought a strange cure for the saddest of maladies 
— the malady which one believes he has, but 
which, grace a Dieii, he has not. 

And Janin used to remark another figure 
walking in silence along the beach yonder, with 
his head bare — the most beautiful head in the 
world since Byron was no more — with his large, 

G 



98 Paris Days and Evenings. 

black, fiery eyes sweeping the wide stretch of 

the ocean, with his hair, curly and whitening, 

flying about his shoulders — the greatest genius 

in France- — Chateaubriand ! For here, in some 

hostelry, Madame Recamier had improvised a 

summer salon. That which a ferame da monde 

does for her chamber in an inn, Madame 

Eecamier did for her salon in an inn. M. 

Ballanche and M. de Chateaubriand, at a certain 

hour each day, disposed of themselves in it ; 

Madame Eecamier arranged herself as best she 

could on the hard sofa of Utrecht velvet, the 

hook was preciously drawn from its little box, 

and the reading of the " Memoires of M. de 

Chateaubriand " recommenced. 

Jules Janin was not wholly happy at Dieppe, 
and this was his complaint : " What saddens all 
these places which the sea bathes is a race apart 
of English voyagers, who are indeed the saddest 
men in this world — both the most bored and the 
most tedious ; nomatic race, having no country, 
and peddling its opulent misery from Florence to 
Paris, from Paris ^to St Petersburg ; pale Britons, 
who go everywhere, who repose everywhere, who 
eat and sleep everywhere, but in England ! An 
Englishman in London is an intelligent being, 
active, occupied, laborious ; but Englishmen in 
France — the English at a sea resort — Oh ! the 



Paris Days at Dieppe. 99 

sad and lamentable figures ! They arrive here 
in their oldest clothes, and with the most dis- 
dainful of physiognomies. To see them hitched 
one to the other, one would say they were a flock 
of sheep, badly washed and badly combed. 

" As soon as they reach a town, they seize 
possession of it, they are the masters of it, the tow^n 
is theirs, there is no place for anyone. They 
talk loudly in their impossible language, and 
are allow^ed to go in troops wdth their tall, dried- 
up and yellow waves. AVithin the walls of the 
city of Dieppe a citizen of Dieppe is a rare 
curiosity. When the bathing season comes, 
every proprietor of a good home here puts an 
English sign on his door, announcing to the 
passer-by that his home is for rent. He cedes 
everything to the first comer, provided the first 
comer is English. The moment the house is full 
the proprietor disappears, one does not know 
where — divinity present, it is true, yet invisible ; 
who sees everything and wdiom no one sees ; who 
understands English at least as w^ell as French, 
and who speaks neither one nor the other. 

"But what joy w^hen, in the midst of this 
inhabited desert, you meet a man of your daily 
life, or a pretty and amiable Franqaise of Paris ! 
Then you realise that there are people in the 
world who are not vagabonds from England 



lOO Paris Days and Evenings. 

... In this manner at Dieppe we French have 
placed altar over against altar, and extolled 
France as against England, gaiety and good 
humour as against ennui and melancholy, 
vin de champagne as against cider — ' et vive 
la joie ! ' " 

Should we have said that was written some 
fifty years ago and not yesterday ? . . . Thus, 
we listen on our cliff to the eternal roar of the 
sea, and to the eternal roar of race hatred. 



Parisian Family Life by Contrast. 

I VENTURE to intercalate, among these Lutetian 
sketches, the following outline of my brief 
glimpses of Dutch interiors, with the excuse 
that it may suggest, by contrast, characteristics 
of the Parisian foyer. 

(Amsterdam, November 1893.) 
We had never been in Holland in winter, and 
were hoping to find, instead of this melting 
April weather, some of those picturesque ice- 
scapes and skating scenes which Koekkoek and 
Schelfhout loved to paint with such wonderful 
feeling for ice. But we regret to learn here that 
all that Dutch era of marketing and merry- 
making by the peasantry on skates is wholly 
past. 

Our notice this time has thus been turned 
especially to interiors, and we have been happy 
in viewing Dutch domesticity in two or three of 
the best families in Amsterdam. Love for the 
home keeps tormenting the average American 
who lives in Paris until he has succeeded in a 



102 Paris Days and Evenmgs. 

measure in supplanting it by the French fond- 
ness for theatres, cafes, and the streets. The 
relative lack of chimney-corner welcome in 
France for the stranger — the vie fermee of the 
Parisian family — is perhaps not emphasised often 
enough. The French who are real French, and 
not a mixture of some other race, take merely a 
sort of salon, or pension, interest in you ; that 
is to say, no personal interest. The hospitality 
one receives at the hands of Parisian acquaint- 
ances and friends is, comparatively speaking, 
that of being gracefully left uninvited and freely 
alone to one's self. It is a fashion which, after 
all, has its decided charms and advantages, and 
appears to harmonise with the delightful French 
cult of politeness. 

It requires only a short sojourn in Amsterdam 
to enjoy something of that cosy, open-armed, 
warm - hearted Netherland hospitality, which 
makes Parisian family life look to us rather thin 
and poor. Possibly our experiences here may 
seem worth the recounting. We have come to 
see some Amsterdam gentlemen on business. 
Among them is an erudite and acknowledged 
leader in the Dutch Calvinist church. He at 
once invited us to dine at his home on the ap- 
proaching Sunday evening, and we were more 
than pleased at this opportunity of observing 



Parisian Family Life by Contrast. 103 

with our own eyes the manner in which the 
Calvinist Sabbath in Holland differs from that 
of the cheerless and rigid Puritan, and from the 
gay and chilled type of day which haunts the 
French cheminee. The first thing that struck 
our notice, after having been presented in this 
domestic circle on the evening in question, was 
the number of offspring. There were four boys 
and three girls. The eldest of them, a daughter, 
was about twenty years old. All of them were 
lively, good-humoured, and more or less buxom. 
They were blessed with the beautiful Dutch com- 
plexions — clear skins, red cheeks. We have 
since learned that large families here are the 
rule among the better classes. One of our 
acquaintances, a millionaire, has had seventeen 
children. 

English was spoken by all the members of the 
household with considerable fluency, and the 
conversation was carried on in our tongue. "VVe 
at once felt at home. The presence of strangers 
in their midst did not seem for an instant to alter 
the nature of the hearthstone intercourse. We 
sat down at dinner. A prayer was offered. 
During the repast everyone was very talkative 
and at ease, as if at his own fireside. The young 
people in particular were disposed to get up and 
wait on themselves, instead of asking the servant 



I04 Paris Days and Evenings. 

to serve them. But there was one thing; which 
we remarked with a genuine, if somewhat strange, 
warmth of comfort. It was the frank and abun- 
dant evidences of spontaneous affection that 
were displayed among the family. One of the 
boys, coming near his father in quest of some- 
thing, snatched the pleasure of kissing him ; and 
the mother also, having had occasion to whisper 
to her husband, took the opportunity of kissing 
him on the cheek. After dessert, and while we 
were still at table, one of the daughters distri- 
buted hymn-books, sat down at the organ, and 
led in a religious service. The father read a 
psalm and offered another prayer. 

On quitting the dining-room he showed us up 
to his library, and we talked over some matters 
of business. We should not have expected that 
business would have thus been made an outright 
theme of discussion in a Dutch Calvinist home 
on Sunday ; yet we find that the Calvinist gentle- 
men here are quite free to call on each other on 
the Sabbath in order to discuss secular prospects 
and sketch commercial enterprises. 

After an hour or so we went downstairs for 
refreshments. Tea, coffee, claret, and cakes were 
passed. The family were assembled in a most 
hospitable and household-like way. English and 
American literature became the subject of con- 



Parisian Family Life by Contrast. 105 

versation. They were fond of Scott, had not 
read Thackeray, and said that they could not 
appreciate the types of character and humour of 
Dickens. George Eliot was much admired. They 
were about equally divided as to whether " Adam 
Bede" or the "Mill on the Floss" should be 
placed at the head of the list of her works. 
" Jane Eyre " was familiar to them. The young 
people had been deeply interested in " Robert 
Elsmere." No remark w^as made about its religious 
bearing further than that the mother at length 
observed that she did not see how its attitude 
could be regarded with satisfaction. It was clear 
that " John Halifax, Gentleman," best suited 
their tastes, and came nearest their ideal of a 
novel. They seemed to have heard nothing of 
Poe and Irving, but knew of Cooper and Mark 
Twain, and loved Longfellow. The mother 
quoted a stanza of "Tell me not in mournful 
numbers." 

Meanwhile the youngest members of the 
household were occupied in romping about and 
having a good-natured time. One of the boys 
was engaged in making osculatory excursions 
among his sisters, much to their amiable distress. 
Finally one of the girls outlined her impatience by 
threatening him with a cuff on the ear, exclaim- 
ing : " Let me alone, won't you, please ? You 



1 06 Parts Days and Evenings. 

are altogether too — too " — and she fluttered 
about for the correct word in her Eng-lish vocabu- 
lary, at last alighting on — " kissy." Where- 
upon the father spoke up: "No, that is not 
right. What is the word ? " addressing the 
question to us. We began grubbing among the 
roots of our composite language-plant, while 
temporarily submitting " osculatory." " Oh 
yes," he responded ; " osculatio — Latin — that is 
so." " Still," we said, " that is hardly the term 
for this particular instance." " Well," he asked, 
"^fond of kissing ; how will that do ? " So we 
let it go at that. 

During the evening an old friend of the house- 
hold joined the group — a professor in a Dutch 
university. To judge from his appearance, one 
would have thought him thoroughly dried up 
with erudition ; but he proved as juicy and as 
jovial as the rest. His beer-drinkiug and wine- 
sipping, his smoking and talking, all appeared 
to mix harmoniously. One of the daughters at 
length concluded to retire, and kissed each one 
of the family. When she arrived at the pro- 
fessor on her tour of good-night salutations, she 
would not accord him the same favour. He 
commenced to complain of her discrimination, 
and to set up his rights to the osculatory atten- 
tion which it seemed she had always bestowed 



Parisian Family Life by Contrast. 107 

on him. In spite of his arguments and appeals, 
she held her ground, claiming that his breath 
smelt of tobacco. A general discussion ensued 
about the tobacco habit, for the Netherlanders 
are the most inveterate of smokers, in that they 
ever keep vigorously puffing instead of idling at 
it. Some of those present attacked the use of 
tobacco ; others defended it. The eldest daughter 
proved its most decided enemy. As the result 
of it all, the professor was left unkissed. Toward 
half-past nine o'clock the father excused himself, 
saying that he must do some work, but he begged 
us not to hurry. As no one else was quitting 
the circle, we were happy to remain, and did not 
come away until after eleven. 

The great pleasure of this Sunday evening 
scene lay in our realising how something of the 
jolly, cosy home life of the old genre painters of 
Holland was being unconsciously interpreted for 
us by a cultivated household. There was cer- 
tainly as little of Edinburgh Puritanism about 
this Sabbath as any seventeenth-century Dutch 
canvas can well picture. 

This notable exuberance of animal spirits in 
the Dutch, their non-French ways of bounti- 
fully expressing family love by snug kisses and 
hugs, would seem to go with much eating and 
drinking ; and this impression appears con- 



io8 Paris Days and Evenings. 

firmed when, at cafe cm lait in our liotel of 
mornings, curiosity induces us to sample eight 
kinds of breads. And of course cheeses abound, 
especially a variety which looks, smells, and 
tastes like new calico. Do the Hollanders, one 
asks himself, take bits of their dull foggy weather, 
and whiffs of the heavy seasick odours that lie 
in their streets and hotel corridors, and fabri- 
cate them into these " coagulated decays," as M. 
Vacquerie would call them in disgust ? For one 
wonders about the composition of these strange 
Dutch cheeses, as he tosses through the hours of 
the night, after having greeted some of them 
too vigorously for the first time, and tries to 
revel in the celestial chimes that every fifteen 
minutes clash loftily across the darkness from 
the heights of the Dam. We are not prepared, 
however, to affirm that the Hollanders are ex- 
ceptionally great eaters, since the dinners to 
which we have been invited here, and where 
Amsterdam guests were present, have surprised 
us by their modesty of girth, and have made 
us think of the contrast offered by the con- 
ventional Parisian repast with its numerous 
courses. 

This matter of eating calls to mind that salt 
and pepper colours are on every hand here, 
not only in exterior but in interior effects. 



Parisian Family Life by Co7itrast. 109 

Carpets, curtains, tapestries and wall-paper are 
usually of this homely, comfortable hue, even in 
parlours ; while in French houses, the distingue 
and chilly salon styles of furniture and furnish- 
ings often pervade the kitchen. Take that 
costly race monument — the Ryks Museum. Its 
. facade, its mosaic floors, its ornamentations 
are of a general salt and pepper tone, and con- 
firm this as the national colour of this country 
of firesides. The hue finds unique expression 
in rag carpets. They are seen everywhere here, 
yet never, I think, in France. In a villa in 
Hilversum we remarked the same coloured kind 
of rug carpets and plain wall-paper that used to 
adorn our old farm home in the Genesee valley 
twenty-five years ago. We have nowhere sur- 
veyed residences in Europe which so closely 
resemble, externally, typical New England and 
New York state dwellings as those at The 
Hao[ue. 

The Hollanders are contented with the fact 
that their life is around the hearthstone. " We 
are such sleepy people," said to us a young lady, 
whose father is one of the commanders in the 
Dutch army. " Even the coming of the royal 
family does not wake us up. At The Hague 
they make a great fuss over the court, but the 
Amsterdam ladies are very indolent about 



no Paris Days and Evenings. 

calling on the Queen Eegent while she sojourns 
here. They do not like to give themselves the 
bother ; they are so fond of staying at home ! " 

Whatever exists on a miniature scale in 
Holland — and there necessarily must be much 
— is fittingly personified in our generation by 
the little Queen. The Dutch love her dearly, 
and you experience something of the charm of 
this unrepublican idea when, in passing the long, 
white-faced Chateau of Soestdyk, on a fine June 
day, you lift your hat in honour of a girlish 
figure which you see flitting back and forth by 
some open window, and a small royal arm 
promptly waves its salutations at you. Yet the 
sentiment in the Netherlands in favour of a 
republican form of government has become so 
strong, we are told by the editor of one of 
the daily papers of Rotterdam, that were the 
Queen to die, or to choose an unpopular 
consort, a republic would certainly result. The 
success of French democracy and the recent 
events in Belsjium have their full efi'ect on the 
Dutch. 

The Amsterdam people are sure to ask you if 
you have seen the so-called '•' Night Watch." 
The Calvinist claims Rembrandt. He translates 
Rembrandtism into Calvinism, in that they both 
make the home the centre and temple of 



Parisian Family Life by Contrast. iii 

Christian life, and do not keep it within the 
precinct and paling of cathedral and church as 
does even Eiibens ; and also in that, while they 
have little esteem for the nude, they put em- 
phasis on the clothed body — the whole clothed 
body from head to foot — and give an unequalled 
value to heaven's evangelical sunlight, and, by 
contrast, to mysterious, God-hovering depths of 
black backgrounds. The Hollanders seem to 
have felt and expressed in painting, more 
beautifully and profoundly than any other race, 
the manner in which the nourishino; gleams of a 
solid, comfortable, trust-in-Providence life may 
pour through the dark, the eclipsed, realms of 
the soul. The "Night AYatch " w^ould appear 
then to be, in a way, Calvinism in colours, and 
the Sabbath home circle of which we have spoken 
above illustrates how% in the Dutch Calvinism, 
the devotion to a sombre religion is lighted up 
by the rays of the love of a hearty, world- 
contented daily existence. 

We are haunted by the remorseful souvenir of 
having slightly wounded the susceptibilities of a 
memorable Amsterdam family by carelessly re- 
marking at breakfast that the superb and 
exhaustless miracle of the Dutch era of painting 
may be partly explained by the fact that 
Holland sacrificed, in effect, the other arts for 



112 Paris Days and Evenings. 

that one. " Poor abused Holland ! Why, we 
have had great poets — Vondel — Bilderdyk — 
Jacob Cats — Huj^ghens — Revius," pleaded a 
pink-and-pearl-cheeked daughter of the house, 
in a hurt voice, from across the table. 



Mourninor for President Carnot. 

Last Monday morning the young Parisian 
woman who serves my cofiee came in as usual, 
and among her matutinal salutations happened 
to remark nonchalantly that the President had 
been assassinated. I supposed she was jesting, 
and when she finally produced the morning 
journal to prove that it was not a p)leasantry on 
her part, I was so visibly impressed with the 
tragic event, that she half naively, half banter- 
ingly, asked if I were a relative of M. Carnot. 

I wound my way along the boulevards about 
three o'clock in the afternoon, curious to behold 
how those exhilarating precincts looked in the 
shadow of a national grief. Scarcely an evi- 
dence of mourning was to be perceived in all 
that great centre of Paris. There were the 
same lively streams of people that one observes 
every day in the year ; the shops were open ; 
the Bourse was as noisy as ever. The only 
variations in this scene were that the men 
at the cafes held black -bordered newspapers in 

a 



1 1 4 Paris Days and Evenings. 

their hands, tmd that a small draped flag hung 
inconspicuously out of the office of the Temps. 
The general display of indifference was some- 
thing of a shock to me. I chanced to meet two 
emotional American friends who had been 
scouring the metropolis to see it prostrate under 
this sudden blow, and their disappointed — in 
truth, disgusted — reports confi.rmed my observa- 
tions. There was no sign of a solemn hush on 
the air, on faces, on the wonted activity. 
While the world was imagining how the pall of 
death must have been throw^n over the French 
capital, the Parisians seemed to be taking the 
catastrophe little more seriously than the insigni- 
ficant fall of some ministry. 

The next day, when the telegrams of con- 
dolence began to arrive, and when the awe- 
stricken expressions of sympathy from the 
foreign press began to be quoted, the citizens of 
Paris commenced to furl and crape a flag here 
and there. It is Friday, and the State funeral 
will occur on Sunday, but the city is as yet very 
lightly, meagrely, draped. The public is neither 
spontaneous nor overwhelming in its manifesta- 
tions of grief. My coff'ee-maid had correctly 
personified its attitude. A gentle insouciance 
has been, on the whole, the keynote of the 
week. 



Mourning for President Carnot. 1 1 5 

Why is this ? Because, for one thing, the 
character and role of the immaculate Carnot 
were effaced. Unlike Lincoln and Garfield, he 
is associated with no movement, struggle, or 
event dear to the popular heart. 

And then the Parisians do not mourn in our 
manner. They are not, as a race, so rapidly 
and profoundly disturbed as we are by dolorous 
occurrences, and do not yield so profusely to 
sad emotions. Their disposition for and cult of 
gaiety make them quicker than we to seize the 
blithe and elated aspects of affairs, and to 
strain the fun out of serious matters. By the 
limitations of this trait, they are less speedily 
and freely moved by misfortune : they are less 
prompt to take an infelicity keenly, and to realise 
all that it means. 

One reason why the French, as a race or 
as individuals, do not manifest ojDenly a tribu- 
lation as much as Americans, is that something 
of the traditional influence of the old court life 
is disseminated . among them. They act more 
as people who are in the circles of a court and 
always before the eyes of strangers — of the 
curious. Thus they observe a certain etiquette 
and restriction in the display of woe. We have 
more of the habits that come from being much 
in our homes. We are more disposed to act in 



ii6 Paris Days and Evenings. 

public as in private, and to give more over- 
flowing, and therefore more homely, testimony 
of our moods and seasons of despair. 

I have frequently thought that the Parisians 
mourn by colour rather than hj form. As to the 
shape of things, cheerfulness and pleasantness 
are ever suggested in France as the result of the 
allegresse and sweetness of the general tempera- 
ment. So full are the French of, the joyous 
note, that they strike one as having no very 
racial, national, or individualistic fashion inform 
in their expression of disconsolateness, as they 
have in their expressions of light-heartedness. 
Their mortuary traditions may be traced directly 
to old Italy. The crape-wound gas-jets, burning 
in the blazing white mid-day all around the 
Elys^e Palace, where President Carnot's body 
lies, somehow recall to one scenes of death in 
Naples. 

Or, if the French can be said to have mourn- 
ing forvis of their own. then these formes are 
comparatively gay. Take the style of the toilets 
of bereaved Parisian ladies. The hue is black, 
but the outlines, instead of flowing narrowly and 
humbly down in sorrow, mount engagingly up 
and out, and are often vivacious and coquettish 
precisely as in the non-mourning garbs. The 
Parisian widow, by the pattern of her dress and 



Mourning for President Carnot. i i 7 

turn of her bonnet, is almost invariably repre- 
sented as if courting a conquest rather than as 
overcome with grief for the departed one. There 
is only the black colour to make known her 
affliction. 



LETTERS AND COLOURS. 




THE ACADEMY. 



The Academy. 



{January 1894.) 

For the lover of modern literature there is no 
feast of eye so rich and ample as that offered at 
a public sitting of the French Academy. To 
study the faces of the Immortals for two or 
three hours, and to |2;aze at the representatives 
of French culture who are assembled to do them 
auditory honour, bring forcibly to one's mind 
the fact that such official occasions are unique in 
the history of letters. Of course many of these 
mortals and Immortals are not by any means 
distinguished. Fame has never lost her bonnet 



122 Paris Days and Evenings. 

in chasing after some of them. But here are 
habitually found together a far greater number 
of celebrated literary people than in any other 
spot in the world. 

This afternoon M. Challemel-Lacour is being 
received to fill the fauteuil of Kenan. Who is 
M. Challemel-Lacour ? He is merely President 
of the French Senate, an institution as decora- 
tive and undemonstrative as a museum of 
porcelain jugs. The rarer the vase, the less its 
utility. 

One finds difficulty in putting names to faces 
as he beholds the immortals. Only those does 
he recognise whose photographs are freely dis- 
played about town. The venerable Jules Simon 
is remarked at once — an amiable, smiling 
countenance, notwithstanding its eighty years. 
Sardou, who is sitting just back of him, is a 
slight man, not tall. His hair is black, and his 
shaven face is very mobile — an actor's face. 
His clothes look somewhat worn and rusty. 
He nods quickly and good-humouredly when he 
sees an acquaintance in the audience. He is 
wealthy, and lives in summer in a magnificent 
villa on the crown of the highest hill at Marly. 
One glances through the lofty iron gates at the 
Egyptian sphinxes that watch the entrance to 
his grounds. The view from his aerial perch is 



The Academy. 123 

fine. Far away and down below lies Paris in 
its nest. The whole panorama, on August days, 
swims in a delicate blue haze that skirts the 
long lines of distant hills. A few steps from 
Sardou's villa is the summer place of Dumas — 
a modest house on the street. The two greatest 
living French play- writers dwell here side by 
side, and are the best of friends. 

None of the Immortals, to judge from their 
guise this afternoon, give much attention to 
their habiliments. Their garments are sensibly 
commonplace and unnoticeable. Sully Prud- 
homme, who is the chief attraction in certain 
Paris salons, and is reputed to have broken, in 
spite of himself, more than one choice heart 
— even he is dressed somewhat carelessly, as if 
he found it a bore to be dragged out to the 
Institute. He- is, to use the term in its essential 
French signification, the most distingue of these 
renowned men. 

Eight in front of him is M, de Vogiie, also 
one of the estimable figures in contemporary 
French literature. No one, they say, handles 
French prose better than he. His face is of a 
distinct Slav type — a dark skin, a bushy beard, 
and something vague and remote in his look. 
The Due de Broglie and the Due d'Aumale are 
present. The latter seems a very old man, wath 



1 24 Paris Days and Evenings, 

sunken eyes and a gray moustaclie and goatee. 
There is a vacancy in his regard. On the last 
row is Pierre Loti. He is a fragile person, with 
large gazelle eyes, and haunted with a timid air, 
as if he expected to be frightened into flight 
every moment. 

All the Immortals are not here, for we should 
quickly recognise Dumas, Pasteur, Coppee, 
Claretie, Pailleron, with his dainty feminine 
ways ; Emile OUivier, with his giddy manner 
and elevated steps ; Freycinet, with his dim- 
inutive figure and homely bearing ; Meilhac, 
with his twinkling eyes, polished head, and 
round back ; Leconte de Lisle, whose appearance 
suggests one of those sleek and massive bulls 
which he is so fond of making bellow across his 
verse. Perhaps Coppee remained at home to- 
day, so that his washerwoman would not have 
to leave him another line, saying, " Je suis 
Venus avec le linge." On one occasion, he 
informs us, she left him this unconscious octa- 
meter to tell him that she had come with his 
linen, but she fell into difficulties with her 
orthography — " I am Venus with the linen." 

The first time I ever looked -down on the Im- 
mortals I was struck with the fact that their 
varying attitudes, the curious diversities in their 
shapes of head, their expressions of face — some 



The Academy. 125 

visages smiling, smirking, others as sad and 
forlorn as eternity — confirmed strikingly the 
truth of the Darwinian theory of our human 
ancestry. There are several very small and 
very aged Immortals who faithfully answer our 
mental roll-call at these sittings. They seem to 
be nicely done up in cotton and flannel, and slip 
along to their corners as quietly as indisposed 
animals. 

Of course many noted literary Frenchmen are 
not to be found here — Zola, Daudet, Bourget, 
Lemaltre, France, Faguet, Sarcey, Heredia. 
Daudet long ago announced his intention of 
never posing as a candidate for the Academy, 
and has alw\ays made fun of it. The Figaro 
has just discovered that the Academy occasion- 
ally tilts the balance the other way in the 
following fashion. Sometimes letters come here 
addressed to Daudet by people who naturally 
think that he is one of the Immortals. Such 
missives are returned to the writers, and bear 
the legend : " Unknown at the Institute ! " 

In constantly refusing to admit Zola to its 
precincts, the Academy illustrates its moral role. 
This is quite a^ genuine role, for, to give one reason, 
the antechamber to this nightcap cupola is the 
sombre and lofty " Revue des Deux Mondes," 
which is the great monument of morals in France. 



126 Paris Days and Evenings. 

UnfortuDately, its managing director, to the 
astonishment of everyone, abruptly fell from 
grace last summer, and the incident was closed by 
the selection of the formidable critic, M. Brune- 
tiere as his successor. The Revue has gained 
hereby in ability, and has lost nothing of its 
imperial frigidity. Bold indeed would be the 
common mortal who would go over a.nd attempt 
to skate in the cold salons and among the cold 
columns of the potent sanctuary in the Rue de 
rUniversite. 

The " Revue " puts into training a goodly per- 
centage of those who become Immortal* and no 
Bohemians, no Zolaists, no people with hair-in- 
the-wind careers and ideas, need apply. As a 
consequence, the favourite physical type of 
Academician which seems to evolve is . a man 
who is more or less paved with baldness, who 
wears cotton in his ears, has cold feet, looks 
blank, for whom the visible world does not exist, 
and thus he either shuffles microscopically along 
the ground, or steps high and uncertainly like a 
blind horse. 

The Parisians are always making sport of the 
Forty whose "Sesame" charms these magic doors. 
" lis ont de I'esprit comme quatre ! " is a daily 
parody of a familiar expression ordinarily applied 
to a single person. And what witty and well- 



The Academy. 127 

known old Frenchmen used to say humbly : "I 
am a mere cipher, not even an Academician ! " 
Still all Frenchmen, save five or six, would give 
almost anything to be made Immortals. 

The Academy is a typical French institution. 
It is a kind of social club ipar excellence. If 
women were suddenly removed from French life, 
the Academy would soon become extinct. Men 
would not pay any attention to it were it not for 
the other sex. Ambrosial dinners, and the lovely 
assiduities of the ladies who fan the flames of its 
vanity, keep it alive. Few masculine mortals 
could resist the perennial prospect and pleasure 
of coming out frequently in state, and being 
ardently admired by the Parisienyies, with their 
ribbons and perfumes and delicious manners and 
compliments. 

The predominant gregarious instinct of the 
French is herein characteristically displayed — 
the love of company instead of solitude and 
individualism. M. Challemel-Lacour is re- 
expressing it in his address : " For four centuries, 
letters in France have developed by constantly 
mixing into our social life : they are a part of it. 
French thought has found, in this alliance with 
action, a preservative against the irregularities 
of imagination, and has found, also, that admir- 
able equilibrium which constitutes our literary 



128 Paris Days and Evenings. 

authority." This, of course, strikes the keynote 
which forever resounds in tlie A cadem}?-,. namely, 
sensible conventionalityrather than bizarre origin- 
ality ; le hon sens rather than insanities and 
eccentric excesses of genius ; form rather than 
lucubration ; grace rather than profoundness ; 
conversation, comedy, and life as it is, rather 
than poetry, reverie, romantic ideality, and 
solitary tragedy ; the blending of great minds 
in harmony rather than the jarring of amazing 
individualities. 

The Institute represents the French cachet of 
solidarity, the French gift of being charmingly 
and impersonally on parade, and the French 
conservatism in everything except national 
political life, since the influence of the Immortals 
on letters and thought is never progressive. 
The Academy is ever pulling back in the traces : 
it is always about one generation behind the 
times. Under Louis Philippe it was Legitimist 
or Napoleonic ; under Louis Napoleon it was 
Orleanist ; and under the Eepublic it still has 
the reminiscence of Orleanism. When Roman- 
ticism was on the throne the Institute was 
Classic ; when Parnassianism was in favour it was 
Romantic ; while Realism has been in vogue it has 
been Parnassian ; when Idealism (?) comes, it will 
doubtless be sufhciently Realistic to accept Zola. 



The Academy. 129 

For, as a rule, a man becomes a member of the 
Academy wlien he, or his celebrity, or both, 
begin to die. And herein lies its other great 
raison d'etre : it is not only a tribute to women, 
as we have noted, but it is a mausoleum for 
fame. Old age seems to be the most thoroughly 
and systematically looked out for and protected 
in France. French people make sure that their 
last days shall be comfortable. They venture no 
risks with Providence on that score. Youth and 
middle age are busily occupied in preparing for 
the coming years of feebleness and dependence. 
Even the most flighty, pin-headed French concert 
singer or dcmseuse is always industriously pilino- 
up the sous and buying rentes for the time when 
her decade shall be passed, and she can earn no 
money. Theatres, business houses, guilds, the 
Government, all virtually take care of their 
personnel until death, by systems of funds 
[retraites). 

And so the Academy is a scheme for preserv- 
ing the notability of its members when their 
glory shall have become comatose and moribund. 
A member may have ceased to work, or may 
have grown obsolete, yet the Academy conserves 
him in a measure to publicity, and he has the 
pleasure of tasting its honours every week as 
long as he lives. This house of refuge is an 

I 



130 Pmds Days and Evejtings. 

immense boon for the old age of not a few 
noteworthy men, whom the changeable, short- 
memoried public would leave to die in an 
isolated and neglected senility. In this way, the 
Institute has been a nameless blessing to many 
an Immortal who would otherwise have been 
wholly forgotten. It is a hostage to the future, 
a guarantee against the vagaries of a progressive 
and fickle world, an insurance against the death 
of fame, a monument and a glorification of one's 
past and of the past. 

It recalls the poem of Coppee on the young 
Pharaoh, who, in response to the adoring prayers of 
his people to commend them to some noble work 
which would perpetuate his name and renown, 
consented by saying : " Build my tomb ! " 



Renan. 

' - {December 1892.) 

It is a Saturday afternoon of last March. We 
step into the College cle France at half-past two. 
We find our way into a homely little class-room. 
It is heated by a bulky stove, whose ugly pipes 
wander across the ceiling in search of an outlet. 
There are present about thirty people, of whom 
one-third are women. Some of the young men 
have Bibles in Hebrew, and two or three priests 
have come in. A small door opens, and Eenan 
enters with a black book under his arm. He is 
smiling. He sits down behind a long, cheap 
desk, on which there is a glass of water. He 
takes up at once, without prelude or ceremony, 
the strain of his discourse, as if he were running 
over with things to say. 

He is short, bulky, without shape. His face 
seems dull and heavy, and almost formless. It 
is enormous. The profile is powerful. The 
immense nose, noble forehead, and good chin 
belong; to a man of his renown. He has no neck. 



132 Paris Days and Evenings. 

His hands are white, big, and fat, and have long 
nails. His eyes are laxge and brown, and they 
are handsome. 

His voice is somewhat broken and uncertain. 
Frequently while speaking he looks down at the 
floor at his left, and apparently loses himself in 
thought. It is then that even those just in 
front of him can barely hear what he says. 
He appears infirm, and an unfriendly auditor 
might say that he is verging on dotage and 
garrulousness. He has no notes. The book he 
has brought in is the Old Testament. He has 
opened it, but does not refer to it. His topic is 
the Law of Moses. He uses the plainest lan- 
guage, and makes no pretension whatever to 
salient sentences or climaxes of any kind. He 
seeks neither to astonish nor amuse. 

He goes once or twice to the blackboard and 
writes a few Hebrew or Greek characters in 
illustration of the changes in the ancient texts 
of the Bible. He draws these characters as if 
his hand were trained. They are firm, clean, 
perfect. He lays great stress on the chaste 
beauty of certain passages of Isaiah. He com- 
pares them to Homer. He cites the opinion of 
some authority who does not agree with his idea 
of the text, and softly exclaims : " Oh, oh, ce 
n'est pas ca, non, non, non." This phrase he 



Renan. 133 

often repeats in the course of liis lecture. He 
warms up with fine placid ardour when he hap- 
pens to mention something which evidently 
recalls an old scholastic contest. His favourite 
words this afternoon are "simple" and "gran- 
diose." 

He has the clearest manner conceivable in 
examining and developing his thesis. You feel 
that he is a ripe scholar, an enthusiast for 
investigation, a man who does his work lucidly 
and loves to do it simply. You think of Mom- 
msen's reference to him as "A savant in spite of 
his beautiful style." He has the air of a felici- 
tous rather than a profound thinker, and of one 
who does not go along between two walls in his 
search of truth, but welcomes it in whatever 
form it presents itself. He seems the slave of 
no creed, no tradition, no superstition, no preju- 
dice ; at least he is as free from them as one can 
well be. You repeat to yourself — '''' What an 
admirable companion ! What a delight he must 
be to his friends ! " We know that he does not 
attempt to surround himself with the mystery 
of greatness ; that he does not act as if he were 
conscious of having the halo of erudition above 
his head ; that he does not pretend to be any- 
thing more than an average man in quest of the 
verity. He may often be frank in his statements. 



134 Paris Days and Evenings. 

He may often indicate amiably a cruel, naked 
fact, and give a velvet sliock to our ^nglo- 
American reverence for things for which our 
forefathers fought and died, yet his French deli- 
cacy wholly disarms one. 

It strikes half-past three. He says that he is 
sorry he cannot continue the subject to-day. He 
gets up in his smiling way, tucks his book under 
his arm, someone fondly unlatches a little gate 
in the railing which hedges him in behind his 
desk, and in an instant the grand mattre has 
passed through the door. Such was Eenan as 
he appeared in his lecture-room last spring. Six 
months after I w^a^tched his funeral cortege leave 
the court of the Colleg;e de France for the ceme- 
tery of Montmartre. 

He was held in respect, we may believe, by all 
France. Monseigneur d'Hulst, one of the orator- 
priests of Notre Dame, discoursed on him one 
evening recently before the Cercle Catholique in 
the Eue du Luxembourg. It is fair to suppose 
that on this occasion there was heard what may 
be considered the final Catholic estimate of Renan. 
The drift of the conference was outlined to me 
by a friend, a priest. Monseigneur d'Hulst said 
that Renan's private life was irreproachable ; 
that he had wonderful courage ; that he left the 
•Catholic Church because he could not honestly 



Renan. 



3d 



stay in it ; that he was an important historian ; 
that he was the best writer of French prose in 
this century. The remarks of the Monseigneiir 
as a man were thus laudatory in the extreme, 
but his peroration was that of an ecclesiastic, 
since he concluded by affirming that Eenan could 
only be regarded as a " mal faiteur " (a wrong- 
doer). 

In literary France Eenan is one of the highest 
contemporary ideals. Dumas calls him "the 
pope of free thought," and always has near his 
pillow one of Kenan's books ; " for," declares the 
eminent dramatist, " they satisfy my reason, mj?" 
sesthetics, and my ideal." George Sand wrote 
that Kenan had " the divine talent of giving 
wings to everything, and of artistically treating 
ideas which for others remained brute and with-, 
out form." Banville, in a ballad, sang of him as 
one " who turns his phrase in a volute." 

Writers and critics in France occasionally dis- 
cuss the question. Which of Kenan's books will 
live the longest ? Strange to note, they do not 
imagine that it will be " La Vie de Jesus," nor 
any of his religious works. They fancy it will 
be his " Souvenirs of Infancy and Youth." Were 
any humble testimony admitted, I might say 
that no other French book of prose has made 
upon me such a fragrant and delightful impres- 



136 Paris Days and Evenings. 

sion. I know of no French volume which is a 
purer and more delectable inspiration to young 
men. Its rareness consists of its charm of sim- 
plicity and of its flavour of a rich soul. And 
in it is not merely embalmed the soul of a great 
man, but the soul of the quaint, half- forgotten, 
dreamy people of Brittany — a race, with all its 
affection and picturesqueness, as curious in its 
obstinacy as one of Kenan's " old Breton saints." 

No library is complete without the "Souvenirs 
of Infancy." The volume should lie where one 
can see it every day, as it is an irresistible plea 
for wholesome refinement and tenderness. It is, 
indeed, the product of one whose favourite poet 
was Lamartine, and whose cult of modesty was 
so scrupulously observed that he avoided the use 
of colons for fear of appearing to have something 
noteworthy to impart. Someone has traly ob- 
served that Renan "thought like a man, felt like 
a woman, and acted like a child." The scholar 
who fought a celebrated fight so bravely and 
sweetly, and who was wont to ask his mother, 
"Mamma, are you contented with me?" merits 
a place among one's models of our epoch. 

If you have not read the "Souvenirs," do not 
defer the pleasure too long. And when you 
come to the book, read it slowly, that none of its 
gentle spirit and perfume escape you. It makes 



Renan. 137 

humanity seem dearer, and keeps one from drift- 
ino; too miicli with eo-otistic and insular tenden- 
cies — tendencies amusingly illustrated in an 
incident which Renan tells of in "Feuilles 
Detachees." One day a priest in Brittany 
delivered such a touching appeal that his 
hearers, with one exception, shed tears. A 
robust individual, who was leaning against one 
of the pillars, remained unmoved throughout the 
sermon. Some one said to him finally, "And 
you — you are not weeping?" "Why," he 
replied, " I don't belong to this parish ! " 

Renan practised what he hinted relative to 
the love of money, and left not a sou in the 
world — nothing but his library. This indiffer- 
ence to gold was saintly, yet its material legacies 
were not all agreeable. His writings brought 
him comparatively little revenue. He let his 
publisher, Levy, arrange the terms, and gave no 
heed to them. He was not akin to Victor Hugo 
in this respect. Renan's naive insouciance 
about the future harmonises with the indecisive 
trustfulness of his essays and addresses, and 
doubles their persuasiveness. 

Perhaps the only thing to be regretted by 
those who trace the symmetry of his career, was 
his attempt to enter politics. He solicited office 
twice, I think, and both times was decidedly 



138 Paris Days and Evenings. 

beaten. How was a man of his qualities, after a 
life spent over his manuscripts, to know what 
average voters are like, and how were they 
to know who he was ? He could never have 
learned the art of exploiting a political repu- 
tation. The French working-man is anti-clerical, 
yet he had never heard of Kenan. The story 
is told of one who, in looking at the tickets 
preparatory to balloting at a certain election 
where Eenan was a candidate, asked, " Who is 
this Kenan?" "Why, he writes famous books 
on the Bible." "Oh! a priest! Well, that's 
one of the fellows that don't ketch my vote ! " 

Kenan's meek sway in France is unquestion- 
ably great and enduring. And what, in a word, 
is "Kenanism"? It is, they say, one state of 
seraphic existence for those who cannot accept 
the dogmas of the Church. It is a combination 
wherein thought is unconfined, and the heart 
and soul diffuse an incense redolent of spirituality. 
In " Kenanism " the marriage of the brain and 
the heart leaves each free to exercise its peculiar 
functions in a pleasant union. Neither yields 
anything to either, and each is enriched and 
beautified by the other. This the " Souvenirs 
of Infancy" makes the French esteem more than 
any code or list of precepts which Kenan could 
have formally laid down. 



Rena7i. 139 

In France, until Kenan's day, no one, it seems, 
had ever withdrawn from the Catholic prelacy 
on account of its intellectual teachings, and suc- 
ceeded in exerting anything of that penetrat- 
ing moral power which the Church claims for its 
singular grace and glory. Thus the clerisy could 
always apparently demonstrate that intellectual 
godlessness was inevitably moral godlessness. 
But Kenan's personal influence for uprightness, 
sweetness, light, plain living and the home, is 
admitted by everyone, and no one in Paris 
appears to raise the question of the " Abbesse de 
Jouarre" "The Discours a I'Association cles 
Etudiants," and the Letter to Flaubert, apropos 
of his "Tentation de Saint Antoine," do not for 
an instant pique a fear in honest French bosoms. 
The typical compatriot detractor of Eenan con- 
tents himself with Blender shafts of ridicule and 
irony, like the writer in the "Eevue Positive," 
who, M. Anatole France tells us, remarked that 
Eenan drew his own portrait in all his histories, 
and that he was represented notably in "U Anti- 
christ," under the traits and features in Nero. 

It was his episcopal practices and virtues 
which serenely blessed the unctuous and benevo- 
lent historian of the people of Israel with un- 
conscious triumph, for if Monseigneur d'Hulst 
could have put his finger for an instant on a 



140 Paris Days and Evenings. 

weakness, or a regrettable incident in Kenan's 
moral constitution or conduct, he would have 
won the case of the Church, to his own satisfac- 
tion, at least. It was, nevertheless, to Kenan that 
an anonym, several times a year, mailed a letter 
containing the sentence, "If, however, there 
prove to be a hell ! " 

M. Jules Lemattre wrote, in the Debats last 
October, the following epitaph on his sceptical 
and beatific curate : — 

" There are many among us whom Eenan has saved from 
impiety. He has taught ns how we can cease to believe in 
the dogmas of religion without severing ourselves from the 
past. He has taught us how to cherish, in spite of all, the 
myths which have consoled and sustained men throughout 
the centuries. He has shown us how to love the ethics and 
the dreams of the Church, and how to preserve our soul 
intact, with all its obscure powers, and with all its inherited 
needs." 



Literary Lectures. 

France is the land of famous — popular — literary 
critics. Have you not thought that there is 
in Germany, England, and the United States 
scarcely one living literary reviewer of current 
repute ? It is, indeed, somewhat embarrassing 
to attempt to name one w^ell-known German, 
English, or American writer of to-day, whose 
occupation is, and whose national if not inter- 
national fame rests on general literary criticism 
— whose celebrity is won, like Sainte-Beuve's, 
by striking notes along the whole clavier of a 
literature. Not that these three countries have 
no reviewers of books. On the contrary, critics of 
the humanities abound there as in France. Yet 
they appear rather disposed to be specialists who 
devote years to one subject. Therefore the 
domains of their reputation are of comparatively 
narrow limits : it has not the leaven of a facile 
household and sidewalk, news-stand and pension 
popularity. The French reviewers, unlike their 
non-Latinized brothers, handle all the varieties 



142 Paris Days and Evenings. 

of literary theme with equal ease, charm, and 
public success. They treat religion, philosophy, 
poetry, tragedy, the Vaudeville, the Chat Noir — 
ever}?" conceivable topic within the range of 
French letters and Parisian book life. 

Perhaps you have fancied, as had I, that the 
literary censor on the Seine writes in a swallow- 
tail, wears the neatest of brilliants, uses per- 
fumed lace handkerchiefs, and is a model of 
universal taste and scrupulous fashion. Nothing 
could well be further from the truth. Possibly 
M. Jules Lemaitre is enchased in some such a 
setting, but his critical confreres are plain men 
who toil in a plain way. And all of them, 
whether fastidious or not, accomplish a fixed 
amount of work fortnightly — turn out their 
one or two volumes annually — with a certain 
machine-regularity, being little inclined, rela- 
tively speaking, to wait for hours of inspira- 
tion and particular moods of lettered felicity. 
They are to be found with a pen in hand every 
mornino' in the year, for it is merely to continue 
writing that they slip off for a part of the 
summer to Ville d'Avray or Sceaux, or even as 
far as Normandy or Brittany. They are not 
fond of flitting away from their cage of Paris 
where the literary existence is nervous, and 
given up to each day as it passes. They need 



Literary Lectures. 143 

the champagne of keeping their physical selves 
and their names constantly among and before 
the Parisians. 

Living; and working; in the exhilarating; at- 
mosphere of their metropolis, the French critics 
of helles-lettres have not the habit, as a rule, of 
letting a manuscript season long in a drawer. 
They think, I suppose, that such a practice may 
be pushed to excess. The story is told of an 
"ideally conscientious reviewer" who, apropos 
of a new comedy, determined to do full justice 
to tlie author, the public, and himself, if it took 
six months. So he went night after night to 
see the piece, and insisted on revising his judg- 
ment, refashioning his paragraphs, repolishing 
his details. Finally, he published his essay, and 
in it proved that the play did not merit a 
run of ten evenings. It had already run a 
hundred ! 

The foreigner who familiarizes himself with 
the waitings of the present Parisian reviewers is 
struck, of course, by the ignorance of all con- 
temporary literature save that of their own 
country. The one modern language they know 
is French. It is true that they have sipped cups 
of tea from M. de Vogue's samovar of Russian 
fiction. Yet this appears to be the only general 
courtesy they have shown foreign letters of our 



144 Paris Days and Evenings. 

century or indeed of any modern century. 
There is not, and never has been, a cult — a 
veritable cult — in France of Dante, of Shake- 
speare, of Goethe. An exception, though, may 
be made in favour of the land of Cervantes, 
because it has played a certain conspicuous role 
in French belles-lettres — a role beginning with 
" Le Cid " of Corneille, and continuing with " Gil 
Bias " and " Figaro " and with " Hernani," " Euy 
Bias," " Carmen." It is the amiable and amus- 
ing M. Sarcey who puts the top layer of stone on, 
as it were, this Chinese wall of the national in- 
sularity of French literary critics by suggesting 
now and then that it would be better if Shake- 
speare were not staged in Paris. He boasts of 
the fact that he is unable to find any con- 
siderable satisfaction in the author of Hamlet. 
He holds that " the grand Will " is an overrated 
playwright — a kind of persistent fad. 

All the above is the result, in great part, 
of the traditions of French education, which 
virtually hugs Greek and Latin to the exclusion 
of exotic modernity, with something of the old- 
time royal and imperial idea in France that 
civilization has Athens, Eome, and Paris for its 
three torches and seals, and that the rest of the 
world is in more or less unenlightened and 
Cimmerian states of barbarism, 



Literary Lect2tres. 145 

Together with his almost incessant activity of 
pen, the Parisian censor of letters is quite apt 
to be a lecturer. M. Anatole France, however, 
is not a conferencier, and, in truth, has latterly 
drifted wholly into the realm of fiction. Nor 
does the Q-enial M. Lemaitre court the orator's 
chair, for his Fates take unkindly to proposals 
that his delicacy and esprit should be dissipated 
and lost in the atmosphere. An athletic-looking, 
handsome man, he has the accomplished bearing 
and manners of a society gentleman everywhere 
except on the platform. In this environment 
he is breathless and awkward ; his fingers clutch 
nervously around his face ; his attitudes annoy 
him ; he stumbles, halts, and seems painfully 
in fear that his next sentence will utterly refuse 
to come forth. 

M. Faguet, also, was not intended for a 
lecturer. Of strong physique, he has an agree- 
able countenance, a warm air, alertness, vigour, 
and he at once wins your solid interest. But 
he is rather sans-gene in his chair. His arms 
fiy about in a multitude of incongruous and 
ungainly gestures which have little relation to 
his remarks. He perks up his head, and twists 
his eyes from one side to the other, keeping them 
half screwed together, as if endeavouring to 
be incisive, epigrammatic, sjnrituel. And he 

K 



146 Paris Days and Evenings. 

really triumphs in all tliis in an uncommon 
degree. 

The rest of the great literary critics of Paris 
are famous professional conferenciers. The doyen 
among them is the venerable M. Deschanel 
of the College de France. He is the favourite 
with a certain class of unoccupied adults, who 
are fond of being lightly entertained on themes 
of books. Soft-voiced, gentle, witty, he reads 
his manuscript in a most conversational and 
modest way, and sweetly serves his hearers with 
harmless sugar-and-water impressions, being 
only too well aware that their literary stomachs 
are feeble. M. Larroumet, although much 
younger, is to the Sorbonne, we may say, what 
M. Deschanel is to the College de France. He 
attracts, as a rule, a promiscuous public, and 
vociferates his notes successfully, ascending 
readily all the foothills of the lecturer's task 
without undertaking to scale any of its peaks 
and summits. 



M. Brunetiere is a belligerent who likes to 
crack people's heads. Vinegar foams around the 
edges of his mouth. He fulminates the thunder- 
bolts of his fury and contempt in every direction, 
terrifying the dialectic weak-kneed, frightening 



Literary Lectures. j/^y 

into silence the babes and sucklings that pule at 
the pap of belles-lettres, and scaring all the 
lettered old maids, youthful has hleus, effeminate 
dilettanti, and innocuous connoisseurs clear off 
the territory of literary French criticism. The 
wonder-loving Parisians frequently express their 
astonishment that so small a statured person can 
make the earth quake and the heavens resound. 

M. Brunetiere is an admirable conferencier— 
incomparably the best in Paris. He is an orator 
and an actor in the lecture chair. He possesses 
the voice, the manner, the confidence, the con- 
viction of a triumphant speaker. He has the 
lost art of believing emphatically, and without 
hesitation, that which he is enunciating. Un- 
visited with the chiaroscuros of indecision and 
doubt, he is not haunted by uncertain. Impres- 
sionistic twilights nor any violet hazes of a 
volatile Pyrrhonism. He belongs to the hard, 
irreconcilable caste of Bossuets who would govern 
oratorically and oracularly with a sense of auto- 
cracy. 

It appears that the specialists smile when he 
trips through their precincts. The savants on, 
for instance, the origins of French letters, or on 
modern French lyrical poetry, seem to be aware 
that M. Brunetiere's chapters on these themes 
bristle with errors, su^Dcrficialities, untested 



148 Paids Days and Evenings. 

assumptions, tentative propositions, hasty gene- 
ralisations, unrestrained conclusions. But wliat 
do we — the common public — know or care about 
the savants and specialists, hidden as they are 
behind slowly and elaborately constructed bul- 
warks of erudite induction and deduction, and 
buried in subterranean galleries in their micro- 
scopic searchings for nuggets of verities ? What 
we can admire and applaud, in our naive, half- 
ignorant, popular love of heroic adventure and 
ferocious feat, is the spectacle of a plumed and 
wrathy warrior, on a puffing steed, who, " quae- 
rens quem devoret," goes charging across the 
domain of French literature, as if it were a wild 
uneven plain, destroying windmills that do not 
exist, unhorsing knights that are already un- 
horsed, rescuing virgins who are safe behind 
moat and ram.part — apparently unimpeded, in 
this uninhabited region, by dykes of argument, 
untroubled by having to be wary of breaches of 
logic, and engaging willingly in the thickets of 
an untilled syntax. To this stimulating practice 
of knight-errantry, and to this superior oratori- 
cal talent, add the qualities of a virile ability, 
indefatigable industry, eminent respectableness, 
the gift of being notably suggestive, and the 
feudal prudence of having castled early in the 
game in the inexpugnable corner of the " Revue 



Literary Lechtres. 149 

des Deux Moiides," and we easily understand the 
explanation of the redoubtable and estimable 
celebrity of M. Brunetiere. 

Inviting hostilities, he usually has had a 
'' small war" on hand with the Bohemian littera- 
teurs, and with the irresponsible young fry and 
little dare-devils of the Paris press — all those 
fellows who persist in wandering outside the 
folds of a decorous Saint Cyr literature, and keep 
burning Bossuet and Madame de Maintenon in 
effigy, and shouting ' ' Baudelaire ! Verlaine ! " 
They delight in trying to pepper M. Brunetiere, 
and the fact that his irascibility does not har- 
monise with his broad, majestic topics furnishes 
them occasional excuses for regaling their readers 
with irreverent and trivial gossip. 

He himself, however, is by no means dumb to 
humour and esprit, and frequently causes his 
hearers to laugh. "Now," he will say, "lam 
not going to make a comedy of myself this 
afternoon by talking of love in comedy. If I 
were to speak of love under any circumstances, 
it would be to a much less numerous audience." 

His course of lectures on Bossuet last winter 
('93-'94), in the New Sorbonne, resulted in 
unexpected publicity. Here was an immense 
amphitheatre, whose ends are clasped by the 
long, declamatory fresco of the gentle Puvis de 



150 Paris Days and Evenings. 

Chavannes, and wherein no one can be heard 
over twenty feet, owing to the wretched acoustics. 
The regular Sorbonne professors refused to be 
swallowed up in this big whirlpool and silenced 
by its echoing noise. Was the room, then, to be 
condemned forever to official reunions, and to 
the gala fetes of the annual distributions of 
prizes ? No ! M. Brunetiere consented to swim 
in this maelstrom, and the ladies flocked thither, 
with all the furore that even the traditions of M. 
Caro hint of. The orator thus had a vast theatre 
filled chiefly with enthusiastic women, of whom 
one-half never heard any of his sentences, and, 
according to common report, would not have 
comprehended them if they had — facts which, 
nevertheless, seemed only to increase the ferment 
of the gatherings. 

The students, arriving in the hall at the ap- 
pointed hour from their class-rooms, found the 
suitable seats at these seances occupied by women, 
whose buzzing conversation, rustling ribbons^ and 
restless hats, conspired with the bad acoustics in 
making the taking of notes practically impos- 
sible. The young collegians before long began 
to convert the lectures into scenes of pande- 
monium, to organise " monomes," and to create 
Bedlam generally. M. Brunetiere, little daunted, 
hurled forth proclamations of defiance, issued a call 



Literary Lectures. 151 

for arms, declared liimself in a state of military 
defence, to the end that he and the Sorbonne 
were guarded by troops on the occasion of each 
conference, and he was like some Sire of Coucy, 
proudly protected at every turn by soldiers and 
iron, and announcing : " Je ne suis roy, ne prince, 

ne comte aussy " 

The seances ceased, not because they had come 
to their intended close, but because the trouble 
and expense of having a thousand policemen in 
and around the New Sorbonne whenever M. 
Brunetiere gave a discourse, were regarded at 
length too great. It is said that the unfortunate 
event has divorced him completely from the 
students, yet was it to be expected that the col- 
legiate youth of Paris would get, or remain, in 
touch with an editor of the " Eevue des Deux 
Mondes " ? 



M. Sarcey is the perfect type of a bourgeois. 
He has never rubbed on city polish. Sometimes 
in the couloirs of the Theatre Fran^ais he may 
be taken for a cattleman who might have just 
brought a bunch of steers into Kansas Oiij. 
Again, he will be dressed in plain, old-fashioned 
broadcloth, and look like an indulgent grandpa. 
When he gives afternoon talks to girls (and any- 



152 Paris Days and Evenings. 

one else) on French Literature, in tlie Hall in the 
Boulevard des Capucines, he suddenly moves in 
among his feminine auditors about four o'clock, 
betraying his presence by vigorously blowing a 
resonant nose. He commences shakino' hands 
without knowing it, makes vague remarks con- 
cerning the weather, keeps in the way of those 
who are entering, and seldom finishes a sentence 
because he is so accommodatingly jostled back 
and forth. 

From the topic of the weather he floats to the 
question of the time of day, compares his watch 
with the watches of the ladies around him, and 
reaches the conclusion that it must be from four 
to half -past four o'clock. The young women tell 
him how much they enjoyed and profited by his 
last lecture. He is pleased at this, and calls the 
subject to mind. " Let me see — I believe we 
were speaking of Corneille — yes — and what did 
we learn that Father Corneille did for the 
tragedy ? " A stillness begins to mow through 
the chatter and hubbub of the room. He repeats 
the query in a louder voice, and his maiden 
disciples conspicuously collapse into noiseless 
insio;nificance. At length a lad, in the rear of 
the hall, offers a satisfactory response, and re- 
lieves the distress of the suspense. M. Sarcey 
risks no other ambitious interrogatories of this 



L ite^'ary L ectiires. 1 5 3 

sort, and seeks to save the self-respect of his 
young ladies by j)roposing such elementary and 
open-door queries as : " About where was Cor- 
neille born ? About when did he die ? " These 
inquiries, however, are sc^^rcely more successful 
among the frightened ingenues, and he has to 
rely on the lad, who thus serves as a kind of 
claque — that institution so indispensable in 
Paris. 

In this way M. Sarcey, all the while mixed in 
with his audience, drifts into his talk. He lands 
on Boileau, the Satirist, as the theme for to-day. 
In beginning to speak of Boileau he falls athwart 
Eegnier, and fumbles hints of comparison be- 
tween the two satirical poets, evidently leaning 
in his preferences towards Regnier. Eegnier, he 
says, has imagination. Boileau always wanted 
to express the whole, but Eegnier, like Hugo, 
gave a perspective to a word. Finally, it occurs 
to M. Sarcey that he ought to get up on the 
rostrum, so he unwieldily clambers the steps be- 
hind him, and sits down at a desk, whereon he 
discovers a glass of sugared water, a spoon, and a 
volume of Boileau. 

He buries his nose in the book, and reads 
aloud from its " Satires," interrupting, at rather 
long Stapes, the monotony of the Alexandrines 
by varieties of observations having no apparent 



154 Paris Days and Evenings. 

relation to the topic or any topic, and accompany- 
ing the same with tambourining the sugar-spoon 
on the table. " That line is true satire. They 
may tell me what they please, but that is real 
satire. I know the jeunes gens mock at old 
Boileau nowadays. You know my opinion of 
the jeunes gens. Of course, if I were a young 
fellow, I would do as the young fellows do ; 
nevertheless, there is always much yet for young 
men to learn. . . ." He used to write poetry 
when he was a youth — 

" La princesse venait, la, la, la, la . . . 

Maintenant on est gai, li, li, li, li . . . " 

He once saw " Le Monde ou Ton s'ennuie " 
played in Amsterdam, and he found that the 
public encored the passages which the public of 
the Theatre Frangais encores. What does that 
prove ? It is hardly necessary for him to ex- 
plain. Why, it proves that when he saw " Le 
Monde ou Ton s'ennuie " in Amsterdam, he found 
that the public encored the passages which the 
public of the Theatre Francais encores. He 
might read Voltaire's " Candide " twenty times 
to a circle of women, and they would never 
understand it. The women never read anything 
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and 



Literary Lectures. 155 

that's precisely the one point in which they 
resemble the men. 

Long since has he forgotten the hour and the 
place. Six o'clock arrives, and he, with his head 
in his book, is still butting the Alexandrines of 
the headstrong Boileau. At five minutes past 
six several chaperons slip away with their 
charges. At a quarter past six a third of the 
audience is trying to go out quietly. M. Sarcey 
is still butting Boileau. At twenty minutes past 
six the conference is joggled to an abrupt close 
as unceremonious and inartistic as was the com- 
mencement, and every one, including the lecturer, 
is stumbling over disarranged chairs and bump- 
ing against his neighbour, as if in a tenebrous 
precinct and in a thick-thumbed mood. 

Thus M. Sarcey, with his mouth as with his 
pen, gossips and roves about. Looming and 
luno-ing through the world, without anchor or sail 
or signal-lights, he presents a unique and popular 
spectacle. His ostensible shibboleth is "good 
sense," as we are well aware. If he concludes that 
a drama is not based on common sense, he deals it 
a heavy blow. This is the bone he picks with 
Shakespeare. Why, he asks, should sound- 
minded, respectable, law-abiding people cultivate 
a lot of " cranks " like Hamlet and Lady Mac- 
beth, horrible humpbacks like Eichard HL, 



156 Paris Days and Evenings. 

swaggering drunkards like Falstaff? Grace a 
Dieu ! Frencli literature is clear of suck insani- 
ties, freaks, and monstrosities. 

If we go over to the Odeon some afternoon, 
when he, in his hourgeois style, is planted on its 
capacious stage, with the classic grace and poise 
of Athalie for his theme, we hear him entertain- 
ing a large audience in a way that has become a 
tradition, and that makes us reluctant to miss 
one of his sentences, whether written or spoken. 
" Now Joad [the high priest in Athalie] was a 
regular politician. He was a good priest, but he 
had an eye for the main chance. He waited 
until the little prince — his protege — had received 
his first communion, and could ride a horse. 
For what does a pretender amount to who can't 
ride ahorse ? Mon Dieu ! I don't say that Joad 
was acting in bad faith, or that he was playing 
at comedy. Does anybody know, for that 
matter, where sincerity ends and artifice begins 
with the great diplomates ? If Joad prophesies, 
it is because he feels at that instant really in- 
spired of God. Yet you may be sure that if he 
did not feel inspired, he would prophesy just the 
same. What he says in his delirium is vague, 
as, for instance : ' Heaven ! Spread about thy 
dews, and let the earth bring forth its Saviour ! ' 
Now, that does not mean anything. That has no 



L it era ry L ectu res. 157 

more sense tlian tlie famous ' From tlie top of 
tliese pyramids forty centuries look clown upon 
you.' Still it is with these grand sayings which 
mean nothino- that men have ever been led." 

One always fancies that M. Sarcey steers home 
after his lecture, and eats a big dinner in his 
dressing-gown and slippers, prosperously and 
benevolently contented with having churned, for 
an hour or two, the cream of French literature, 
into — not butter at three francs a pound — but 
somehow into buttermilk, retailing at three sous 
a quart to the petits hourgecis and orphan 
asylums of Paris. x4nd you picture him com- 
fortably falling asleep for the night, free from 
anxieties over all such ominous questions as Free 
Will and Fatality in the Drama, undisturbed by 
the responsibilities and annoyances of complex 
subtleties, of erudition, of profoundness, of lucid 
unity, undistressed by the thought of having to 
remember what he said yesterday, or what he is 
going to say to-morrow, unconcerned about the 
proclaimed griefs of an}^ new or long-suffering 
Art, and satisfied with the feeling that sufiicient 
unto the day is the fulness thereof ! 



The Paris Dailies. 

{March 1894.) 

The Paris press is generally held to be tlie most 
powerful and corrupt in the world. It is the most 
powerful because it grasps the peace of Europe 
and the political fate of the Pope in its palm, as 
well as the destiny of France. The French are 
led — governed — more by their daily papers than 
by their magazines, for France lacks the equiva- 
lent of that great balance-wheel in English 
thought and life, namely, the twelve weighty 
British reviews. France has only four or five. 
The Parisians say that it is the Puritan Sabbath 
in (jrreat Britain which accounts for the difference 
— that the British need some sort of heavy, 
periodical reading to pass their solemn and 
tedious Sundays.. 

The Paris press is notoriously subsidised. It 
is always bribed and expects to be bribed, and 
this is such an open secret that a Frenchman 
thinks nothing of it. The noise of the most 
venal papers in Paris is listened to with lively 



The Paris Dailies. 159 

interest and enjoyment. That French journals 
should share in the Panama spoliation in pay for 
their aid in floating the enterprise on the credu- 
lous public of small French investors, caused 
no comment in France, for it was in line with 
custom. Honourable exceptions must be made, 
still they are undoubtedly few. As a rule, there 
is no place in a Paris sheet without its price. 
The distinction between paid items and honest 
news is thus rather lightly observed, and the 
certain lack of conviction and of sacredness that 
one feels in nearly all Paris journals is, therefore, 
inevitable. One comes to reg-ard them more as 
sources of amusement than as sources of instruc- 
tion and serious thought. Their first and main 
aim is to entertain, to enliven, and, consequently, 
the typical skill of the contributor lies in his 
cleverness in disporting charmingly around his 
subject. Themes are treated with effervescing 
pens, so that the articles have the sparkle and 
exhilaration of champagne. 

The daily journals of Paris parade, perhaps, 
more of original wit and humour than the 
American press, but infinitely less accumulated 
pleasantry. The amassed columns of whimsi- 
calities which adorn our American papers and 
go the rounds, are instances of our American 
fashion of trying to do everything in a whole- 



i6o Pains Days and Evenings. 

sale way. The French have the art of not 
spoiling a jest by putting a dozen jests next 
it. In tliis, as in their displays in shop windows, 
their motto is : Exhibit few articles — one article. 
Their artistic sense enters here ; they prefer to 
attract by choice. We, in contrast, court the 
principle of quantity — masses. 

Esiprit in French papers is more or less in- 
filtrated in all their ^articles, or assumes the 
shape of a professedly facetious contribution. 
Thus they are not fond, as our dailies are, of 
flanking a sober column, containing not a sus- 
picion of a smile, with a compact column of jokes. 
The most characteristic type of humorous jour- 
nalism in Paris is conversational. The reader 
is treated to colloquies, scenes of burlesque, 
saynetes, wherein esjyrit is developed in the form 
of repartee. This responds to the French genius 
for comedy, and satisfies their need to talk, and 
to talk wittil}^. Even the stately Temps has 
occasionally an amusing sketch in dialogue — an 
interlocutory hitting off of the current political 
or social topic. 

The average jest in a French paper does 
not seem to me to be intrinsically better than 
the average American pleasantry. It is only 
once or twice a wTek that I reall}^ -laugh at 
the one or two funny items which the Figaro 



The Paris Dailies. i6i 

prominently presents each morning. Take the 
one of yesterday as a fair example : " There are 
no longer any children : A young man of six, 
who had heard the Panama scandals discussed 
intimately in the family, because his father 
had been actively engaged in the affair, an- 
nounced the other day to his sire : ' Pa, if you 
don't give me ten sous, I will have you cited 
before the Grand Jury.' " Still, the wit of the 
French press is the most celebrated in the world. 
It has a way of getting brilliantly disseminated. 
It is blessed with a certain distinction. Our 
American press is, after all, so far away from 
Europe. 

The French dailies revel little in illustrations. 
At rare intervals one catches glimpses of the 
crayon of Caran d'Ache, Just now the Figaro, 
by way of exception, is indulging in a series of 
sketches by Forain, and they are, of course, 
unique. He makes his characters say what is in 
the text, and this the illustrating artists do not 
by any means always do in other countries. 
Herein, in general, the French are superior. We 
are apt to lose precisely the best part of pictorial 
humour. It is not so much what is said, but 
the manner of the person who is saying it. A 
familiar example of this shortcoming with us is 
seen in the well-known drawings of Du Maurier, 

14 



1 62 Paris Days and Evenings. 

which have been running for years in Harpe7''s 
Monthly. His characters, as he delineates 
them, destroy, rather than accentuate, the con- 
versational effect of the dialogue. 

The two following themes illustrate those of 
Forain in the Figaro. Bismarck before William. 
After having fallen on each other's necks, 
William says : " I am exceedingly glad to see 
you for several reasons, but what I want above 
all, is to read you a play I have written in 
five acts." Again, a young lady, all bundled up 
in grief on a long chair. An elderly gentleman, 
wrapped up thickly in his overcoat, leans over 
toward her in the industrious attempt to ex- 
tricate his son and heir from some delicate 
complications. " Well, well. Mademoiselle, I 
cannot for the life of me understand how you 
could have thought that my son was serious 
about it^ — a gamin who is not twenty-seven 
years old ! " 

Despatches do not characterise the French 
journals. They do not compare with our papers 
in furnishing the facts of the day. Their first 
page is not taken up with telegrams as a draw- 
ing card, but with editorials, contributed articles, 
and reportorial paragraphs. In this respect they 
are not so modern a pattern of newspaper as 
ours. The editorial, which has declined with us^ 



The Paris Dailies. 163 

still holds undisputed sway in Paris sheets. 
Their meagreness of despatches applies naturally 
and notably to America, for the French have so 
little to do with us as a nation. They are more 
interested about our Indians than about us, and 
confuse us delightfully with Central and South 
Americans, and with Blacks as well as Redskins. 
They are disposed to think we are a race of 
freaks, always doing unheard-of and gigantic 
things, and disporting along the borders of a 
region where erratic imaginations and an im- 
possible climate streak up and down in a lurid 
fashion, with Buffalo Bill and his troupe skirting 
through at intervals. Their journals are largely 
responsible for this conception of America, since, 
as a rule, they only insert items concerning 
our colossal railroad accidents, our ravages by 
cyclone, our negroes skinned alive in Kentucky, 
our saloon-keepers turned Prohibitionists in Iowa, 
and sending their saloons up in an apotheosis 
of flame and cloud. Deal out such information 
about a country to readers year after year, and 
what must be their conclusion ? 

The Rappel, which has a two or three line 
despatch from the United States each day, sur- 
prised everybody early one December with a 
six liner, describing the phenomenon that six 
inches of snow had fallen in Minnesota. They 



164 Paris Days and Evenings. 

were evidently under the impression that Minne- 
sota lay in the south. This is the longest 
American despatch I believe I have ever seen 
in the Rappel. And, for that matter, why 
should the Rappel know about Minnesota any 
more than the average Chicago paper knows 
about the department of the Mayenne ? 

This relative inattention to despatches means 
the absence in France of that contention for tele- 
graphic messages which is a feature of American 
journalism. This lack of strife for news extends 
to the social columns of the Paris press. There 
is no breathless rush for, no wrangling about, 
chatty paragraphs. How freely and easily the 
Parisian newspaper gets its gossip is illustrated 
by a little incident which chanced to come to 
my notice last summer. I had occasion to offer 
to the New York Herald (Paris Edition) a bit 
of news from the seashore. Precisely a week 
after it appeared in the Herald the Figaro un- 
earthed it, and published it in double-leaded type 
in one of its costliest columns. From the Figaro 
the item was taken and again printed by the 
He7xdd. Four days later, the Gaulois produced 
it, having doubtless discovered it in the 
Figaro ; and the following day the Echo de 
Paris inserted it, having evidently found it 
in the Gaulois. In none of the papers was 



The Paris Dailies. 165 

the paragraph accredited to its source or any 
source. 

This indulgent practice, a Parisian would cor- 
rectly observe, is an indication of the way the 
French have of living sweetly together. That is 
to say, it is due to the lack of the element of 
rivalry, for competition appears to us so con- 
spicuously absent in France in all secular depart- 
ments cf activity. But while the social columns 
of the Paris papers are wanting in, we may say, 
a certain freshness of news, the charm of the 
style in which the paragraphs are composed is a 
never-failing font of delight. They display a 
diaphanous elegance and a picturesque taste 
which are indeed exquisite, and make our 
American manner of turning out social notes 
in a wholesale, machine-made way seem hard 
and grating. The social vocabular}^ of the French 
is undoubtedly more complete and brilliant and 
refined than ours. 

The Paris journals, with five or six exceptions, 
sell for a penny. They cost more when subscribed 
for by the year than when bought from day to 
day at the news-stands. 

This is in application of the great principle of 
French commerce : " Sell cheaper by retail than 
by quantity." Herein, to my mind, lies the 
fundamental reason why the French have never 



1 66 Paris Days and Evenings. 

been eminently a commercial race ; they have 
never learned the science of making considerable 
reductions in wholesale rates. 

The Figaro, still to-day the most celebrated 
of French sheets, is simply the most triumphant 
illustration of what is perhaps the leading trait 
of Paris journals — capriciousness ! It has con- 
sumately exploited this art to a distinction which 
is at once fascinating and disquieting. There is, 
of course, a serious side to the Paris press, as 
shown, for instance, by the Temps and the 
Journal cles Dehats — two admirable journals ; 
yet they only serve to emphasize, by contrariety, 
the capriciousness of the French press at large. 
" Spreadeagleism " is what our American news- 
papers offer by a contrast of similarity. 

The press, they say in Paris, threatens to kill 
the book just as the book killed the cathedral ; 
and a new institution will after a while be con- 
trived which will cause the present daily paper 
to appear a primitive and inconvenient thing, 
and kill it. Ceci tuera cela. The process of 
assimilating the daily news still consumes and 
demands too much time and physical energy. 
This will be but a result of the drift of modern 
civilisation toward the completer realisation of 
each twenty-four hours as it passes. We live 
more in to-day and yesterday than our ancestors 



The Paris Dailies. 167 

lived in their present. The realm and reign of 
actuality are greater now than ever ! 

A Parisian wit has remarked that journalism 
leads to everything — provided one leaves it ; and 
this theme is developed in a way by the follow- 
ing sayings of two French cynics of to-day : 
" The words and sentences which do not mean 
anything have had the most success in France." 
. . . "What an odd generation this is! We 
believe in nothing, and we swallow every- 
thing ! " 



Random Pencillings in the 
Salons. 

■{May 1893.) 

Poor Charles Bovary could scarcely hear the 
opera at Rouen on that famous evening because 
of the noise of the orchestra. One scarcely sees 
the paintings at the salons because of the many 
canvases. Thirty-three hundred pictures to look 
at, in order to find the few that are to abide 
with you ! 

Bonnat's portrait of his mother is coarse and 
greasy. There is dirt in the creases of the face. 
It is wholly lacking in sweetness and sentiment. 
He paints flesh as if it were yellow, tanned 
leather. This is why his " Renan " last year 
was a chef dJceuvre : Kenan's skin was leathery. 
An exception in Bonnat's favour is the rather 
refined portrait which he is exposing this year as 
a companion piece to that of his mother. 

Roybet is the French, and Alma Tadema the 
English sensation here at the Champs-Elys^es. 
" His pictures seem to be done up in curl papers," 



Random Pencillings in the Salons. 169 

one of my friends was saying of the latter the 
other day. His " Roses of Heliogabalus " attracts 
the wondering Parisians, for his palette is new 
to them. 

One sees a few snow scenes by Parisian brushes, 
but the French cannot paint snow. Notice in 
comparison the winter scenes here by the Russian, 
Chelminski. The moral is that there is much 
snow in Russia and not in France. One notes 
several views of northern fiords, and observes 
how the rareness of the Norway atmosphere 
makes its coastscapes appear so naked and 
severely angular. 

Gerome, Maignan, and Detaille are not exhibit- 
ing this spring. Henner is here with his usual 
waxy, nude women, stretched out in ethereal 
languor. Ah, what grace ! Glance merely at 
this arm afloat in a reverie of ideality, without 
hint of bone, joint, or sinew : a melting vision of 
suppleness — of yearning dipped in corporal ease. 

Laurens also is present, with his customary 
absence of good colouring. Yet he can tell a 
story. Remark the vehement and tragic attitude 
of his St Chrysostom arraigning the Empress 
Eudoxia. He is arraigning, indeed, despite the 
fact that the very poor values advance the back- 
ground of the church into the plane of the pulpit, 
and go far to destroy the spaciousness and power 



170 Paris Days and Evenings. 

of the painting. He relates an authentic story, 
too, in his other canvas. Here a young girl is 
kneeling on a chair, and singing to some men, 
who are dressed in the garb of the Eevolution. 
Her mother, the widow of a Vendean general, 
has been amnestied by the Convention, and has 
sent her daughter of seven to the local tribunal 
of Nantes to get " Mamma's letters of pardon." 
She is told that she can have them if she will 
sing her best song. The little maid is innocently 
rendering, with all the energy she possesses, a 
Chouan song, whose anti-revolutionary refrain is 
" Down with the Eepublic ! Long live the 
King ! " Nevertheless, his story recounts that 
she went home with "Mamma's letters of 
pardon." 

Yet we come to see other things. One of 
them is the refreshing delicacy of Eaphael 
Collin's " Sleep." It is a woman's head, reposing 
amid its dreamy waves of hair. One thinks of 
Shelley's muse in the cool, sea-curled haunts of 
the Cumaean Sibyl. 

Lulled by the coil of crystalline streams, 
the green background brings out the fresh red 
tints of cheek and ear. It is not the art of 
painting flesh into shell and conch, but the 
rarer art of flushing pearl and conch with the 
pink and thrill of life. 



Random Pencillings in the Salo7is. 1 7 1 

Then there is an unknown painter — Didier- 
Poug;et — with his refined, delightful luxuries of 
long heather fields on May mornings. You 
smell the heather and feel the gently and gener- 
ously insisting sunlight. In the distance there 
unrolls a whole landscape with a town — all 
veiled in the plum-hued gauze of French haze. 
Who this charmino; artist is I do not know. 
Last year, also, he had a beautiful picture of 
heather fields. No one speaks of hira nor hears 
of him. He appears not to have a friend at 
court. Not even has he an "Honourable Men- 
tion," while scores of "Hors Concours," of no 
merit whatever, are hanging here. 

Then, Pointelin — right here by our elbow. 
Fancy a canvas about fourteen by twenty-four 
inches, with a band of brown paint for the lower 
half and a grayish band for the upper half. 
There is not a tree, house, man, flower, nor any- 
thing in it — nothing but a reflection in a partly 
hidden pool. That is a Pointelin landscape. It 
seems at first merely a coarse brown and gray 
daub. Someone suggests to you that it means 
something. You get over to the other side of 
the room to fill the canvas with atmosphere, 
and the painting slowly takes hold in you. It is 
a priceless mood of melancholy, in which the 
weary folds of your soul smooth out along a 



172 Paris Days and Evenings. 

soothing space of hilltop and sky. The picture 
is plain and facile, yet it quietly makes its way 
toward the depths within you with thoughtful 
directness. 



In the New Salon are bold, fantastic colours 
— greens, blues, fireworks. Whistler was the 
exotic of interest here last year. This year 
it is Burne-Jones, with three metallic and slate 
canvases. A young artist of my acquaintance 
calls him the Puvis de Chavannes, and Alma 
Tadema the Bouguereau, of England. 

Whistler's influence is to be easily traced in 
both Salons. His idealised women are to be met 
with under other brushes — under Gandara's 
brush, for instance. Where do you suppose 
Whistler finds the models he converts into the 
exquisite visions of a "Lady in Gray," or a 
" Lady in Green," for they are perfect Beatrices 
in " Much Ado," Beatrixes in " Henry Esmond," 
Gwendolens in " Daniel Deronda " ? I chance to 
know of a "lady" whom he has thus portrayed. 
She is, physically as well as spirituall}^, one of 
the most unshapely, unlovely, and forbidding old 
subjects imaginable for a painter. 

Zorn does excellent work with his Sweden and 
its people. See the wet water on the voet flesh of 



Random Pencillings in the Salons. 173 

this girl washing her arms. The picture is made 
with a few broad and easy strokes. It has ad- 
mirable light, tone, and atmosphere. 

And what of the Mysticism in contemporary 
French painting that we hear so much of? Is it 
religion ? Is it a profound moral impulse ? Is 
it a fad ? These questions came up one evening 
when I happened to be dining at the home of 
M. Georges Pellissier, the able and well-known 
young literary critic. He said that the Mystic 
agitation was, in his opinion, a caprice, a super- 
ficial fashion of a day — that it was destined to 
have no genuine tenure, no serious influence, in 
France. 

Doubtless it has occurred to you that if Mysti- 
cism were really to come, its interpretations 
would not be confined to helles-lettres and to the 
arts, but would envelop the habits and styles of 
common, everyday life. It would be in vogue 
for men to wear un discouraged and obscurant 
beards and long hair — a Mystic effect. It would 
be the mode for ladies to train their hair low over 
their temples and ears, and make apparent an 
abundance of it, instead of frizzing it almost out 
of existence. This latter style has been the 
proper companion of the masculine one of wear- 
ing only the moustache, and having the head 
trimmed closely. Maids with the hair brought 



174 Paris Days and Evenings. 

down over their brows, like Leonardo's models, 
are Mystic maids. You see a few of them on the 
streets of Paris this spring. A year ago they 
were visible nowhere but in the ateliers of the 
young artists who were painting the Incompre- 
hensible. 

If crinoline were to come, it would be the 
feminine garb for the Mystic cult. Men's 
clothes, instead of being of the scanty, tight 
patterns demanded by clipped craniums and 
shaven faces, would be full, and flow in the 
mystery of ample folds. The youthful French 
Romantics of 1830 affected long locks, huge hats, 
and billowy coats and trousers, and crinoline 
then began its career of wide expanse and glory. 
All this corresponded to the vague, shifting, and 
supernatural phases of the Romantic school. 
These copious fashions are the inevitable ex- 
pression in dress of the Uncertain, of the Mystic, 
just as the present snug, close-fitting fashions 
are the appropriate expression in dress of the 
epoch wherein clean-cut Realism and relentless 
scientific and matter-of-fact standards hold 
supreme sway. 



Apropos of a Sargent Portrait. 

{May 1894.) 

Sargent's portrait of " Mrs Hammersley," at the 
Champ de Mars, suggests the speculative idea 
that the cult of the face is not a French trait. 
In tracing; down the list of the modern French 
portraits you have seen — those of women, since 
we are speaking of the portrait of a lady — can 
you visualise one countenance that, for and in 
itself, has awakened in you an indelible souvenir 
— that has spoken a particular word to you ? 
Are not all these faces in your catalogue empty, 
formal, fit for fashion plates, outshone by the 
wearer's garb or environment ? French women 
on canvases appear to have nothing to say. 
They show no interest in anyone or anything, 
nor does one feel an interest in them, aside from 
the art with which they are reproduced. 

To turn from canvases to books. Do not 
countenances seem to stand out more strikingly 
from the pages of English literature than from 
those of the French ? Eecall the faces protrud- 
ing with characterful effect in George Eliot's 



1 76 Paris Days and Evenings. 

novels — in " Adam Bede," in "Romola." George 
Sand does not equal her in this respect. Victor 
Hugo was apparently unable to burn a visage 
into your consciousness, and still no one doubt- 
less has ever surpassed him in making mere 
vacant human forms move vaguely and omin- 
ously across paragraphs and stanzas. How 
the hollow figure of Jean Valjean looms 
through "Les Miserables"! At the present 
moment I think of no one in the French realm 
of letters who had a better gift of faces than 
Moliere, and yet I fancy he does not rival many 
Enoflish writers for this endowment. 

The Anglo-Saxon race would seem to depend 
especially upon the face for the expression and 
interpretation of character, while the French are 
more disposed to rely on the general appearance 
of the person — on the attitudes and carriage of the 
body. We say, " What a strong, individualistic 
countenance ! " The French say, " What a grace- 
ful person ; how well he carries himself ; what a 
good air he has ! " They are inclined to read his 
message from his whole bearing. In this they 
attach to the Greek artistic tradition — they have 
more of the cult of the body than we. Like the 
Hellenes, they study and esteem the whole figure, 
whether clothed or nude. We, on the contrary, 
rather affect the Puritan and unartistic custom. 



Apropos of a Sargent Portrait. 177 

It is our instinct to try to liide the body, to 
overlook it, to forget it ; we would dress it in a 
shapeless black robe, for instance, to make it 
unbeautiful and unmeaning. But, on the other 
hand, we would throw the notice on the face, 
and render it more impressive, giving it deeper 
lines and more variety, and, if beauty, then a 
personal beauty. 

Or, can we not go back beyond the Puritan 
epoch, and take the great era of painting with its 
Christian inspiration, and find therein that not- 
able attention was awarded the face ? Indeed, 
do we not date from the Man of Galilee in this 
cult and discrimination of countenance ? What 
absorbs us about His physical self is the thought 
of what His face must have been as the lofty and 
spiritual part — the chancel — of the temple of the 
human frame. And this was in typical and 
eternal contrast with the Greek Apollo, who 
shone by the splendour of his form. As an 
illustration of this Christian regard for the coun- 
tenance, I have never remarked on canvas faces 
so masterful in the wrinkled intensity of mortal 
experience, responsibility, and contemplation, 
combined with the confidence, conviction, and 
manifest power of their faith, as those in the 
religious paintings of Memling, in the Hospital of 
St John at Bruges. 

M 



178 Paris Days and Evenings. 

We seem, therefore, to substitute the culture 
of the visage for that of the body ; and the 
French, for their success and distinction, display 
more comeliness in the conduct of their persons 
than we, knowing better how to use their limbs 
and direct their attitudes with effective grace. 
And this is why it would appear suggestive to 
say that, notwithstanding centuries and estate, 
Sargent's lovely lady, with the gently insisting 
charm and expression of her face triumphing 
over its costly environment, belongs to our 
Memling family and tradition with respect to 
the deification of the human countenance. 




M. ROCHEGROSSE IN HIS ATKLIER. 



Sunlight in Modern French 
Painting, 

{May 1894). 

The most modern use of sunlight on canvas is 
to be seen in the " Chevalier aux Fleurs " of M. 
Eochegrosse at the Champs-Elysees. His young, 
armoured, Wagnerian knight stands in the field 
which dazzles with bold and brilliant flowers. 
Some of the flowers nearest him have evolved 
into nymphs seeking to caress his notice. The 
sky is a cool blue in the distance, and a warm 
sunlight is playing in the foreground. The 
treatment of this subject is most daring and 
difficult, and suggests the attempt to sketch, in 
a paragraph or two, the evolution in France of 
the art of this painter. 

The French Komantic school, in so far as it 
reflected the Middle Ages, enveloped itself in 
twilights, penumbras, darknesses. The Christian 
God was associated by Victor Hugo with these 
eff"ects, and partook of the nature of the deities 
of the northern mythology in their lowering 



1 82 Paris Days and Evenings. 

welkin. His worship of God was something 
penetrating upward through the clouds — some- 
thing born particularly of the night. A stream 
of celestial light conducted through the chiaros- 
curos of mortal life, is a truly Christian repre- 
sentation of faith, and is most familiar to us as 
seen in Rembrandt's masterpieces. 

But the mediaeval phase of French Roman- 
ticism had a counterbalance in the Oriental phase, 
wherein were reproduced broad daylights and 
bright equatorial scenes. This was a love for 
the sun-bathed Infinite : a hint of the eastern 
solar cults— of the Buddhistic absorption of 
worshippers in white mosques into the white 
expanses of some heliac Nirvana. 

To confine our notice to the development of 
the successive fashions in sunlight, which began 
by being Oriental sunlight, and has ended by 
beino; of our own clime. The attention to it 
may be traced through the Parnassian school, 
where it received something of the decorative 
sense as, for instance, in the verse of Leconte de 
Lisle. The Realists brought us into somewhat 
closer acquaintance with it. So Manet fell to 
observing the sun's rays in his garden, and com- 
menced to bathe canvases with them. It was 
mere light treated for itself alone, thoroughly 
disseminating between leaves and colours — the 



Sunlight in Mode^^n French Painting. 183 

ever-pervadiDg, na,ked sunshine stripped of every 
academic, religious, or ulterior signification, since 
the Eealists were snatching away all that. He 
thus developed from the bosom of the Eealistic 
school into an Impressionist, for the fundamental 
aim of Impressionism is the observation of living 
light : it means the study of vibrant light on all 
sorts of surfaces and across all length of space. 

This was one stage or state of French Im- 
pressionism : the getting of things out of doors 
into the animate air, and painting them there. 
What has never been attempted before our 
epoch is the painting of the nude en plein air. 
And this is the startling and strong eflfect in the 
canvas of M. Eochegrosse. The nude here 
reflects the warmed and unwarmed light from 
all sides like a mirror, and one feels the coolness 
of the shadows — a novel sensation in painting. 
The nude reflects the cool, blue light from 
the skies, and shows it pervaded by a warm 
sunlight. It reflects, also, the warmth and the 
flower-colour from below. 

One quickly understands how there opens up 
here an elysian domain, where the nude softens 
and gives expression and plastic charm to sun- 
light, and where sunlight, in its turn, gives a 
wholesome, poetic beauty to the nude, as fresh 
and pure and delightful as the thought of 



184 Paris Days and Evenings. 

Nausicaa, by the sea in the white gleam of a 
Greek mythological day. When this cult of the 
real air is directed across space, the full effects 
of intervening atmospheres of course come into 
play, and, as a result, we have the canvases 
which literally pulsate and swim in ether. In 
this way imagination, emotion, poetry are lent 
to themes, and thus Eealism yields to, or weds, 
Idealism. Under this aspect. Impressionism 
may be defined as a Realistic study applied at 
long range. It is Idealistic because it is soft, 
sweet, and soothing, being far removed from the 
brutalities and the unpoetical motives of the 
parent school. 

In these close, but poetic, observations of light 
either near at hand or at a distance, its divisions 
of tones become noteworthy, and are reproduced, 
as we all know, by the dotting scheme, or 
pointillisme. Naturally, like any new concep- 
tions of colour, poifitillisme runs, in some phases, 
into excesses, and fine sport is made of its 
leopard-spotted canvases. Yet a beautiful truth 
lies in its principles and methods, for there . are 
divisions of sunshine in nature, and the only 
way to represent them is, doubtless, by some 
system of dots. 

One may look with interest even at the so- 
ca led Neo-Impressionistic pictures, if he will 



Sunlight in Modern French Painting, 185 

bear in mind that they should be regarded as 
experiments in a new field rather than as 
paintings which one should like to hang in his 
drawing-room. The Neo-Impressionistic painter 
gives himself up exclusively to the divisions of 
tones. Take a vivid prismatic day-scene in 
Venice. The dotted scheme certainly brings out, 
in ways apparently impossible to imitate, the 
varying spaces, corners, nooks of light, all 
opening into each other, and forming, as it were, 
the airy compartments and courts of the vast 
temple or mansion of sunlight. It is not difficult, 
perhaps, for many of us to fancy what pleasant 
expanses and layers light, in this manner, may 
be pictured as containing — now, a tiny bright 
niche, now a little green recess, now a purple alley 
leading away — all side by side, and composing 
an airscape : a view embraced in the very air 
itself. This offers a lovely and novel realm, and 
one which has been scarcely possible to any 
generation before ours, for we greatly excel in 
all scientific and artistic uses of sunlight. 



OPERA AND THEATRE. 



Little Souvenirs of Bizet. 

It was a delightful American lady who used to 
tell us of Bizet June evenings in lier salon on 
tlie crown of the Champs-Elysees, and was wont 
to intersperse our entertainment with impetuous 
excursions to the piano to dash off some strain of 
" Carmen." Educated in Europe, and particularly 
in Paris, she displayed such a mixture of French 
elegance and Spanish fire, that some one re- 
marked on one occasion : " I know now where 
Bizet o;ot his ' Carmen ' — he got it from his third 
pupil!" — for his "Carmen," every one knows, 
does not stop with that of Merimee. 

The dim illumination of the room would seem 
as if murderously masked by the obfuscated 
almagra-coloured lights here and there ; and one 
thought of these warm blood-spots — of Carmen's 
heart-throbs poignarded, or of a toreador clumsily 
gored. The great windows would be flung open, 
and the air would feel thick with the passion of 
our theme, as we vied with each other in 
emphasising our enthusiasm for Bizet's master- 
piece. 



190 Paris Days and Evenings. 

One would point out that, though Bizet was 
the first composer to put a popular type of the 
Spanish temperament into unfading music, full of 
vital colour, he had nothing but French blood in 
his veins, and had never been in Spain, showing 
that a Frenchman is, after all, not inexorably 
denied the genius for exotic lands. Another 
would tell us that he had often followed through 
the scores of " Carmen " at the Opera-Comique, to 
note the weak and false pages and passages, and 
had found so few that were not effectively true 
to the subject, that he believed " Carmen" to be 
one of the most perfect of operas — far superior to 
"Mignon" — from the standpoint of continuous 
relevant interest. Another would say that the 
very first motive in Carmen — that of the openjng 
chorus — lifts the skirts of the opera at once 
above all that is coarse or banal in the subject, 
and shows how Bizet could give a piquant style 
to all that he touched. And another would 
remark that the triumph of " Carmen " is to be 
explained by the masterful wa}^ in which it 
combines Spanish ybi;^i^e with French refinement 
and distinction. 

Doubtless you, too. are a lover of " Carmen," 
and are as curious as were we to get a glimpse 
of the man Bizet, since Marmontel, Galabert, and 
even Pigot have written little of him. So, 



Little Souvenirs of Bizet. 191 

without prelude or exercise, I score here in an 
informal key some fragments of our hostess's 
impromptus about him. 

" Let me see ! Was it in '72 or '73 ? It must 
have been '73, for I was twelve years old — 1861 
and twelve — yes, '73. I remember 1 was twelve, 
for I w^as just then the pride of our family — 
enfant prodige — because I could play Dussek's 
' Twelfth Concerto.' AVe had come from the 
Isle of Wight, and had taken apartments in the 
Faubourg Saint Germain for a long stay. My 
sister and I were to finish our education here. 
A Russian family and our people had been rent- 
ing a villa together in the Isle of Wight, and 
both households were to sojourn in Paris. 

" Our friends belonged to the nobility, and 
had two children — a girl and a boy — Elcko and 
Alexieff. AlexiefF and I fell in love with each 
other, and became engaged a year later, when I 
was thirteen. Every day or two he would be 
saying seriously out loud before any one : 
* Mademoiselle, I am going to marry you, am I 
not ? ' And I would respond faithfully and 
innocently : ' Certainement, j'y compte toujours.' 
But when our romance was finally laid before the 
Tzar, he would not sanction the marriage unless 
I joined the Greek Church. Mother would not 
consent to that, and that's how I missed being a 



192 Paris Days and Evenings. 

princess. Alexieff is to-day Governor of , 

Eussia, one of -the greatest of the Tzar's officials. 

" M. Bizet only had two pupils then, my 
friend and another Russian girl, a sister of the 

celebrated General S . She is a famous 

princess nowadays. M. Bizet did not seem to 
want pupils, and only took those two because 
they interested him. Mamma was very anxious 
that I should take lessons of him, so my friend 
got his permission to let me go with her one day 
and play before him. I remember it as if it were 
yesterday. I was so frightened I didn't see a 
key from beginning to end. But I had been 
pretty severely put to it down at the Conserva- 
tory of Lausanne. It had quite a reputation in 
those days, and then too I played my Dussek 
' Concerto,' and that happened to be a great 
favourite of M. Bizet. He had won his 'prix de 
Rome on it. 

" He appeared to be somewhat surprised to see 
a child — I was not yet even a little ' cornette 
au bout d'un cotillon,' as Musset would say — 
tacklinoj that Concerto under such refrio;erant 
circumstances. When I had finished, he said 
he thought I had done very bravely with it. 
Mamma asked him if he would take me. He 
gave an impetuous toss of his head, with an 
' Ah ! ' as if annoyed by such a question. ' Oh, 



Little Sotivenirs of Bizet. 193 

well, I'll try lier for a while ; yoii know I haven't 
much patience with pupils.' And that's how 1 
became his third pupil, for he hiid no one but us 
— three girls — during the last two years of his 
life. 

" At first he used to come to our place. They 
were half-hour lessons and 20 francs. He was 
supposed to come at three o'clock. You never 
saw a more irregular man. AVe would wait, wait, 
wait ; and 1 was always glad if I thought he was 
not coming, for I was afraid of him, and naturally 
dreaded the severe lessons. Not that he ever 
scolded, but the way he would look at you 
through those eyeglasses ! Our apartments had 
several rooms strung along one after the other. 
When M. Bizet arrived, he would often have to 
knock at all the doors and hunt us up, for some- 
times it would hajDpen that everybody would be 
here and there and nowhere, and my sister and 
I would be hanging out of the balcony at the 
end room of the suite, I revelling in the pros- 
pect of having no lesson. One day he became 
impatient at finding no one, and we heard him 
stop in the room adjoining the one where we 
were, and rap on the floor with his cane, ex- 
claiming : ' Est-ce cju'on m'entend ? Qu'est-ce- 
que je viens faire ici ? Est-ce qu'on croit que 
j'ai du temps a gaspiller comme 9a ! ' 



194 Paris Days and Evenings. 

" And of all the absent-minded persons ! He 
was not conscious of time, place, anybody, or 
anything but music and petits fours at four 
o'clock. He was always dreaming ; up in the 
clouds — loin. He would usually go away and 
leave something in the room — often left on the 

o 

piano the banknotes that mamma had paid him ; 
always forgot his overcoat on the rack in the 
hall, and once in a while the maid would run 
after him with his hat. He did not appear to 
relish the idea of receiving pay ; apparently dis- 
liked to handle money or think of it ; treated 
my lessons as if they were a favour to us. Yes, 
an ideal artist to the tip of his fingers, to the 
ends of his hair; hating the materia], prosaic 
world ; always keyed up to the last notch in a 
realm of his own. He never seemed to realise 
that I existed in flesh and blood ; scarcely ever 
looked at me or touched me ; could not have 
told whether I was blond or dark. I was merely 
a sort of concept taking a music lesson ! He 
was as economical of his compliments as, I 
imagine. Saint Saens is ; always left me feeling 
that no one could be doing more wretchedly; that 
I was utterly stupid, hopeless. Once in a great 
while, though, he would say : ' Pas mal, pas trop 
mal,' and then I felt elated. 

'' I was afraid of him ; yes, but then I was 



Little Souvenirs of Bizet. 195 

over my head in love with the man too — he was 
so handsome. The result was, of course, that I 
could never play my best before him. I would 
practise and work over my lessons, and they were 
hard ones. Think of Chopin's ' Second Scherzo' 
all at a clip, fifteen or twenty pages — yes, here 
it is, sixteen pages ! I would think my lesson 
was going to be perfect, and then when he would 
come in, in his handsome, restless way, it was all 
up with my playing for the day. I was not 
unconscious that I was considered cpite a good- 
looking girl — old for my age — looking nearer 
twenty than twelve. I had a wealth of chest- 
nut hair reaching to my ankles. It somewhat 
off'ended my pride — grieved me not a little — 
to see that M. Bizet took no notice of me, while 
my singing teacher, an Italian, was always hold- 
ing my hands and kissing them, and proposing 
all kinds of delicious romances to me. M. Bizet 
considered me a child. He apparently liked 
mamma ver}^ much. She was a beautiful woman, 
with a tasteful, distingue way which probably 
interested him. He always seemed to want to 
talk with her, and frequently would ask : ' Est-ce 
qu'on ne voit pas madame aujourd'hui V 

" He was as uneasy as a lion in a cage during 
the lesson ; moved about the room, sitting down 
and getting right up again, looking everywhere 



196 Paris Days and Evenings. 

but at the piano. I often tliought he was paying 
no attention to my playing, and sometimes I would 
begin to grow careless, and make little slips in 
fingering, and then he would say savagely : ' Je 
ne dors pas ! Je ne dors pas !' It has been a 
marvel to me to this day how he could detect the 
slightest error in fingering, and be looking at a 
picture on the other side of the room. He never 
touched my piano, never played a lesson through 
for me at our house ; said that he did not want 
to make apes of his pupils. 

" Brimful of music, bubbling over with it, as 
he was every moment, I do not remember that 
he ever whistled a note, but he hummed. He 
had no voice — no, not a bit of voice ; said that 
if he had had one, he would have been a great 
singer. He hummed, always getting tremen- 
dously excited when the music became triumph- 
ant. When I would come to the crowning 
passage in Chopin's ' Second Scherzo,' he would 
become half mad. He would rush up and down 
the room, crying out to me : ' This is the climax ! 
Throw your whole soul into it ! Don't miss a 
note ! Play as if you were saying something ! ' 

" Oh, but I haven't told you how handsome 
he was. He was very plump and vigorous — a 
very showy, attractive man, without ever think- 
ina; that he was, or seemino; to care what his 



Little Souvenirs of Bizet. 197 

effect was on other people. He had light brown 
hair, and a full beard almost russet or reddish- 
brown. His eyes were dark gray or dark blue. 
He dressed with extreme care and for his own 
personal satisfaction. It was one expression of 
his thoroughly artistic nature, and seemed to him 
as natural a need as any other. There was not a 
hint of a dandy about him. He did not act as 
if he were conscious that any one was to look at 
him. 

" He wore the finest linen I ever saw. His 
gloves were gants de /Si^ec/e— ladies' gloves — 
very long, soft, light brown, with no buttons. 
And when he would come in and strip off his 
gloves, throw them on the piano, and reveal 
those beautiful hands ! They were hands of 
shell — the palms all shelvy, with pearly layers 
of flesh and bluish traceries between. They 
were chubby, white, soft — not large ; he always 
said one must have large hands for the piano. 
He seemed proud of them, and careful as a rule 
to keep them covered up — gloved. He had a 
lovely complexion — pink and white. But with 
all his dreaminess— his nonchalant, artistic 
temperament — he did not impress one at all as 
being an ethereal person. He was too healthy, 
too thoroughly rammed with life, for that. 

" And what a gormand for sweets ! He was 



198 Paris Days and Evenings. 

crazy for bonbons, Q,Qk&^, friandises. He always 
had petits fours at four o'clock. He was every- 
where and at all times stuffing himself with con- 
fectionery. As soon as he saw the bonbon dish 
at our house, he would make for it and eat what 
there was in it. He once nearly lost his life 
when indulo-ina; his sweet tooth. There used to 
be a patisserie — very likely it's there yet — on 
the corner of the boulevard right across from the 
old Opera-Comique — Place Boieldieu. M. Bizet 
was there one day when the ceiling suddenly fell 
in, or a part of it. I think one or two persons 
were killed. He barely escaped, for a great piece 
of the plaster struck him on the shoulder, just 
missino; his head. 



" After about a year, M. Bizet said one day : 
' I am too busy to be giving lessons. If you 
are to keep on, you will have to come cliez moi 
hereafter." And so I went regularly to his 
apartment in the Rue Saint Georges. M. Bizet 
did not appear to have mone}^, but Madame 
Bizet had. She was the daughter — the second 
daughter, I think — of Halevy, the composer. 
Their apartment was on the third floor — -very 



Little Souvenirs of Bizet. 199 

artistic, with pictures and bronzes. I remember 
particularly the heavy 'portieres with deep 
fringes. 

"At home M. Bizet seemed a different man. 
When he was cliez nous, he was ill at ease — gene 
— evidently annoyed, displeased at the thought 
of giving lessons, so he rarely stayed longer than 
the half-hour. Chez lui he seemed glad to see 
us, and wanted to visit, especially when mamma 
happened to go with us. He would frequently 
be half the afternoon giving me my half-hour. 
He talked, showed his pictures, and would bring 
in his beautiful baby. He was very proud of it. 
Madame Bizet would almost always come in, and 
altogether it was very hospitable^neighbourly. 

" Here he was interested, enthusiastic — seemed 
to have a wealth of leisure, and made us feel as 
if no one was in a hurry or had anything im- 
portant to do ; and still he worked to excess as 
everyone knew. Here we discovered, too, how 
he loved to play the piano. He would play this 
and that piece, and was apparently very fond of 
matching his hands against the cold, white ivory 
of the key-board. He was a pianist of the 
highest order — superb and brilliant, full of senti- 
ment — entrain, fire — spontaneous, colourful, yet 
having all the technique and precision of the 
Conservatoire. 



200 Paris Days and Evenings. 

" This was in the salon — I took my lessons 
there. His studio was adjoining, and he had in 
it a piano and a little pipe organ. Once he had 
me sing. Gounod's ' Ave Maria/ and he accom- 
panied on the organ. Sometimes he would ex- 
cuse himself during the lesson, and go in to the 
piano in the studio, close the door, and work 
over some strain that would be running in his 
head. This proved to be ' Carmen.' He was 
full of the airs of ' Carmen ' at this time, so I 
heard most of them sooner than almost anyone, 
but of course I did not know what they were. 
We only knew he was at work on an opera. He 
would hum the melodies and develop them on 
the piano. I recall particularly the toreador 
song, and — 

' Jirai danser la seguidille, 
Et boire du Manzinilla ! ' 

" Oh, how he threw his soul into all these 
strains ! Yet he did not appear to harbour any 
illusions about the fate of the opera, for one day 
some one asked him, ' Well, do you think your 
new opera is going to be a success ? ' ' Grand 
Dieu, no ! ' replied M, Bizet, with an impatience 
which revealed the deep undercurrent of sadness 
and disappointment within him ; ' it will fall flat 
like the others,' or words to that effect. He v/as 



Little Souvenirs of Bizet. 201 

really a sad man in spite of all liis vigour, robust- 
ness, and love of music. He had been deeply 
wounded by the critics and the public. He felt 
that people persisted in misinterpreting his art 
— in sacrificing him on the national altar of race 
prejudice. He was accused of being Wagnerian. 
Whether the failure of ' Carmen ' at the Opera- 
Comique hastened his death, I cannot say. It 
was given the third of March, and he died the 
third of June 1875. At any rate, he was putting 
his full energy info it, and giving it scrupulously 
the best within him. You know that Carmen's 
chanson d'entree was rewritten or remade 
thirteen times ! 

" It was in March that I last saw him. Mother 
had suddenly died, and we were all torn up and 
being bundled off to America. My sister and I 
were on the boulevard near the Madeleine with 
the governess one afternoon, and we happened to 
meet him. It must have been in the last days of 
March, for I remember we were to sail April 
second. He stopped, patted my sister on the 
back, took us both by the hands. He seemed 
just the same — as well as ever. Of course I was 
too young to know about the ' Carmen ' fiasco, 
and then we were havino- so much o-rief and 
trouble of our own. This was the first time he 
ever appeared to take any notice of me. I was 



202 Paris Days and Evenmgs. 

wearing my first long dress, and he remarked it. 
He looked at me and said, ' Tiens ! la petite va 
etre tres jolie.' 

" We were astounded to hear a few weeks later 
of his death — and it happens that mother's tomb 
looks right down over his at Pere-Lachaise." 



M 



USIC. 



The Academie nationale de miisique is by no 
means the profound pleasure to me tliat I wish 
it were. The depressed form of the costly pile 
offers fitting plastic shape to the vague dis- 
appointment which comes over me whenever I 
think of the Grand Opera, or look at it from 
my window. The structure is like a magnificent 
beetle partly stepped on. It is a glorious thing 
of beauty quashed out at the sides. And still 
the edifice gives me more satisfaction than I 
receive from the average opera which one hears 
within its gilded precincts. The whole insti- 
tution, from first to last, is for the eyes, not for 
the ears. One goes there to see rather than 
to hear. 

The elegant auditorium is an obstinate enemy 
of music. It deadens, kills sound. Some one 
remarked to a certain Abbe that the room was 
deaf — the French term for bad acoustics. The 
Abbe, who happened to detest French melodies, 
responded, " How happy it must be ! " It takes 
the timbre out of the voices, and reduces the 



204 Paris Days and Evenings. 

volume of the harmony to such a degree that 
often you think you are listening through a 
th^atrophone. The orchestra is one of the 
largest and finest in Europe, yet it never rises up 
and overpowers you. A German orchestra would 
iind its soul and enthusiasm unechoed and dis- 
couraged by such heavy golden galleries, and 
would feel as if it were playing in a luxurious 
deaf and dumb asylum. 

Of course a French band never can make so 
much sumptuous thunder and clang as a 
Teutonic band. It is not in the race. Noise is 
not a synonym of music in France. One always 
remarks the effeminate delicacy and faintness of 
the selections and renderings of the bands in the 
parks of Paris. Apparently, they merely display 
big instruments in order to show what a small 
blast they can make with them. The Garde 
Eepublicaine exhibit the most polished and 
precise execution imaginable, but they greatly 
lack in sweep and power. They are quite 
unable to get into the capacious and tre- 
mendous spirit of Wagner. You are distressed 
to hear them perform, for instance, the Spinning- 
Song of the "Flying Dutchman." Instead of 
swaying you in its spacious and misty circles of 
dreamy sentiment, they jolt the strain up and 
down in a neat, dry trot. 



Music. 205 

One finds difficulty, then, in falling desperately 
in love with grand opera in the French capital. 
The Academie nationale de musiqiie seems to 
me, on the whole, the most palatial attempt 
to propagate ennui that exists. Nothing has 
been seen like it since Nero's Golden House. 
How different grand opera is in Germany ! 
There you dwell in Valhalla, and fight, in com- 
pany with the orchestra and the singers and the 
audience, the battles of justice and virtue, and 
tremble for an hour at a stretch in the divine 
ecstacies of some Gotterddmmeruny. Famished 
and exhausted with such epic combat and 
celestial delight, you are far from finding it 
incongruous when, at the end of the second act, 
the angelic German grandma whom you are 
with gets out her little bundle of congested 
cheese and strangulated sausages, and insists 
on sharing it with you. 

The Opera-Comique in Paris — ah, that's 
another matter ! Here Paris excels. One may 
say that the world would not be blessed with 
"comic opera" were it not for the French. 
While Germany has given in this line com- 
paratively little of enduring value, France has 
produced "La Dame Blanche," "Mireille," 
" Mignon," " Carmen," and then a score of 
famous comic operettas — the " Chimes of Nor- 



2o6 Paris Days and Evenings. 

mandy," the " Mascotte," " Miss Helyett," to 
say nothing of " Offenbach." 

Among the French men of music who are in 
their prime, Saint-Saens appears to be the most 
important. He is the greatest savant among 
them, being a skilled master of music as a 
science — an intellectual musician who furnishes 
a cerebral treat. He has not Gounod's gift of 
melody. Take his " Eouet d'Omphale " as an 
instance of this fact. It is one of his most 
popular numbers. As a mental conception it is 
ingenious, and possesses the most inviting possi- 
bilities. And he gets much out of it ; but just 
when you think you are going to succumb to the 
spell of the delightful air and accompauiment, 
the air is lost to touch. The picturesque sound 
of the roiiet spins in and out, and tantalises 
you in vain with the feeling that it will surely be 
for ever w^edded the next instant to the resistless 
and immortal melody- which is hovering about 
the composer's altar. 

Quite different from the usual style of Saint- 
Saens is his successful opera " Samson and Dalila," 
one of his early works. It is full of sentimental 
colouring. I happened to hear him bring out 
his " Hymne a Victor Hugo," at the Trocadero 
in 1884. An orchestra, a chorus, and a pipe 
organ joined in the execution, and Saint-Saens 



Music. 207 

accompanied on the piano. The occasion was 
unique, for Victor Hugo looked on. I could just 
see his white head in the depths of a box. At 
the close of the " Hymne " the audience rose and 
gave voice to the aj)plause by shouting, " Hugo I 
Hugo ! " But he would not come forward in 
his loge and acknowledge the salutations. The 
" Hymne " was repeated. As the last note echoed 
forth, the enthusiasm was again assuming pro- 
portions when it was discovered that the great. 
poet had disappeared. 

Massenet is very clever, and composes now 
and then a beautiful number. His " Manon " at 
the Opera-Comique is taking a worthy rank. 
His grand operas are not long-lived. When 
I was in Paris ten years ago, I fancied that 
Godard would make an enviable mark. He has 
not developed into a nature, and Avon a public, 
although he has written some good music. 

If the orchestra is the national expression 
in music in German}^, the piano holds that 
honour in France. The French language is the 
piano among languages. Its ever-recurring 
sctccade note, its delicate brilliancy and precision, 
its inexpansiveness, its murmur of ennui con- 
stantly being dashed up in sparkling jets of 
gaiety — all this characterises the clavier. The 
French are the Eivig-Weihliche represented in 



2o8 Paris Days and Evenings. 

a whole race. The eternal feminine is embodied 
also in the piano. Thus it is natural you 
think of Paris when you see one, and long for 
Germany when you hear an orchestra. 

And there is another reason for this association 
of the piano vvith Paris — Chopin. When one 
strolls about in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, he 
is always wondering which of the hotels Chopin 
was wont to slip into on gray afternoons, and 
play to the violet eyes of rare, heartsick coun- 
tesses, who lost themselves in desolate ecstacies 
among the delicious traceries and lonely arabes- 
ques of his reveries. 

They tell us that the world will only know one 
player of Chopin — Chopin himself. It seems 
fitting that Madame Sophie Menter, for instance, 
should render Eubinstein so often — that proud, 
sad, court music suited to a cold, imperial salon 
in some Winter Palace. And other composers 
may easily find interpreters adapted for them by 
nature. But an evening of Chopin, with even 
Madame Essipoff at the piano, is far from satis- 
factory. She is too heavy and stolid, notwith- 
standing the fact that her fingers plunge through 
the rich, velvet waves of sound in an impeccable 
action. This is not letting your hands trail over 
into the ripples of Chopin's caressing seusibility 
and rhelancholy. 



Music. 209 

Von Bulow played Chopin too dryly, sharply, 
precisely. And then when I heard him he had a 
drop on the end of his nose. Mafoi ! that drop 
glistening in the lights with the apparent dimen- 
sions of the Kohinoor ! AVhen one is listening to 
such pages as the " Nocturne in C sharp minor," 
he prays to be delivered from all side issues 
however glittering they may be. There used to 
be a pianist at the court in Dresden who made a 
specialty of Chopin. I forget his name. He 
possessed many of the necessary characteristics. 
He had a frail and inconsolable touch, and some- 
thing: of reverie in his execution. He was a 
little, stoop -shouldered man, and apparently a 
poitrinaire. Still his playing lacked a certain 
distinction, for Chopin's melancholy was never 
commonplace. It is strange that there appears 
to be no French pianist who has a reputation in 
connection with the piano-king of the salon. 

Woman — not love, but the adoration of 
woman — is the great theme of modern French 
music. Her grace and fragility tempt its un- 
remitting courtesy and praise ; her charm is 
reflected in almost all its partitions. Nature 
in its various demonstrative phases, epic-geared 
legends, the master passions, religion, domesticity, 
democracy, each and all pale into insignificance 
when contrasted with Woman — the ideal woman 





2IO 



Paris Days and Evenings. 



of the salon, of the reception gallery, of the 
theatre loge — as the most felicitous source of 
inspiration of Parisian melody and harmony. 
For making her presence exquisitely felt as a 
refined and distinguished motive, French music 
of our epoch is incomparable. 




Mademoiselle Mars. 

{July, 1894.) 

It is rare, even in Paris, that one liapjDens upon 
a cluster of houses once so famously inhabited 
as that to be found in the short Kue de la Tour 
des Dames by the Trinite. Think of Talma at 
No. 9, Paul Delaroche at No. 5, Mademoiselle 
Duchesnois at No. 3, and Mademoiselle Mars at 
No. 1 ! Was it merely an accidental juxta- 
position ? No ! these noted people were ad- 
mirers of each other, and wished to live side 
by side. 

To state the circumstance a little more fully. 
Mademoiselle Mars adored Talma, and Delaroche 
adored Mademoiselle Mars, and was to have 
been seen one evening rushing into her loge, 
kneeling at her feet, and covering her hands 
wildly with kisses in the expression of his 
enthusiasm over her interpretation of some 
scene. Mademoiselle Duchesnois, the tragedi- 
enne, w^as also passionately fond of Mademoiselle 
Mars ; but the very day the latter closed the 



2 12 Paris Days and Evenings. 

contract for the purchase of the hotel at No. 1 
the two friends had a falling out, and never, 
so far as history recounts, fell in together. again. 

You may remember that amusing dinner 
which Mademoiselle Duchesnois gave here to 
Victor Hugo, who was then aljout twenty, and 
just entering the portals of glory, Madame 
Sophie Gay, Mademoiselle Leverd the comedi- 
enne, and the poet Soumet were the other 
guests. After dessert, they repaired in company 
to the Opera- Comique, where the immortal 
" Maitre de Chapelle " of Madame Gay and Paer 
was being sung for the first time. The two 
actresses, Duchesnois and Leverd, placed the 
young Hugo — grave, timid, and disj)osed to 
become severely religious — between them at 
dinner and in the loge, and during the whole 
evening skilfully indulged him, much to his 
solemn discomfort, with a hundred evanescent 
endearments. 

One who loves to linger around historic houses 
in Paris finds this quarter by the Trinity 
especially rich in these treasures ; for, besides 
the renowned dwellers in the Tour des Dames, 
there were Carle and Horace Vernet at No. 56 
E,ue Saint Lazare; Scribe at No. 12 Eue Pigalle; 
and Miguet at No. 14 Eue d'Aumale, with his 
friend Thiers close by. But of all these drowsy 



Mademoiselle Mars. 213 

streets, the Eue cle la Tour des Dames is the 
drowsiest. The blinds of the Talma residence 
are always hermetically sealed, and the other 
buildings present to the passer-by an aspect of 
crocodile indifference. The hotel of Made- 
moiselle Mars nowadays appears to be the head- 
quarters of an Algerian railway company, yet 
it does not seem any the livelier for that. True, 
her "petit hotel," as she called it, ranks not 
among; the laro;est, neither is it of the smallest. 
It is a plain, two-storey, old-fashioned Paris 
house, with a pair of Doric pilasters flanking its 
front door. It is on a side hill, and from one 
of the upper side windows the signal doubtless 
was given for the robber who was to commit 
here one of the greatest thefts of diamonds 
known to the annals of peerless jewels. 

And Mademoiselle Mars ? What do we call 
to mind about her ? She was the queen for at 
least twenty-five years of the comedy boards of 
Paris. For thirty-eight years she was a con- 
spicuous gem in Thalia's crown, having achieved 
her first grand success on the stage in 1803, and 
having bid adieu to it in 1841. This farewell 
took the form of a gala representation wherein, 
at the age of sixty-two, she was seen as Celimene 
in "Le Misanthrope," and as the Marquise in 
" Les Fausses Confidences," two roles which had 



214 Paris Days and Evenings. 

been lier triumph forty years before, Slie did 
not have gejiius, but she had a royal talent — a 
talent which made her proud to be thirty years 
in perfecting the turn of a phrase or a gesture. 

Her hotel, however, suggests that we think of 
the woman rather than of the artist. It was 
her beauty, womanly accomplishments, and active 
mind, her taste, her queenly graces, her match- 
less tongue, her cool strong head, which enabled 
her to hold such undisputed sway for so long an 
epoch. She had all the charms to which flesh 
is heir, even to her thirty-two teeth, "no more 
and no less." The story is told of a Philadelphia 
dentist in Paris who declined to receive pay 
from her for professional services, saying, " You 
have paid me, Mademoiselle, by affording me 
the pleasure of beholding the handsomest teeth 
in the world." The American dentist, it seems, 
had begun already at that early date to get 
Europe by the jaw ! 

The mots of Mademoiselle Mars, her doings 
and adventures, her toilets, her jewels, her 
opulent existence, were the current gossip of the 
day for three decades, and every one was making 
love to her, from Napoleon the Great down 
to men who were too little to be mentioned. 
She always remained a Bonapartist, she always 
remained faithful to Napoleon ; and this fact 



Mademoiselle Mars. 215 

launched her into many a war which she might 
have avoided had she been content simply to 
cry " Vive Moliere ! " We remember the 
incident of the Eoyalist director of the Theatre 
Fran9ais, who cordially disliked her loyalty to 
the Empire, and was delighted one day at a 
chance, as he thought, to put his heel cleverly 
on her. A part of his name was Papillon 
(butterfly). Mademoiselle Mars had entered his 
official room to request a leave of absence. He 
remarked smilingly, " You can have a leave of 
absence, dear Mademoiselle — when roses become 
lilies." "And I," she promptly retorted, "will 
ask you for another favour — when butterflies 
become eagles." 

Mademoiselle Mars was, like Napoleon, a 
warrior worthy of her nom de guerre. There 
was a decided mixture of steel in her make-up, 
and she could thunder, in her woman's way, 
along every chord of martial ascendency. She 
could be, if necessary, as " cold as a carafe of 
orgeat," and she was a tempest when the mood 
seized her, and those about her could well 
exclaim, " C'est vraiment du temps de Mars 
aujourd'hui." 

At times she appeared to be carrying on a 
campaign against all Paris, and whenever, as a 
result, she seemed on the point of being over- 



2i6 Paris Days and Evenings. 

wlielmed and annihilated, she would win the 
day by a witty word, and become as priceless 
as ever. Her esprit was of the highest strain? 
since it did not fail her under fire. One evening 
a large company of royalists came to the theatre 
for the purpose of making her vociferate "Vive 
le Eoi ! " She bantered and coquetted with 
them from the stage, and was as persistent in 
refusing to satisfy their demands as they were 
in their noisy demonstrations. At length, seeing 
that the disturbance was swelling in proportions, 
she advanced to the footlights, and said : " You 
wish me to cry, ' Vive le Eoi !' Eh bien, voila 1 
have done it ! " and the agitators were thus 
deftly silenced. S-uch conquests are peculiarly 
complete and satisfactory, for one's belligerent 
capacities have been fully shown therein, and 
one's hon mot has saved him both from the 
danger of a defeat, and from the fear of any 
revengeful desires which a fought-out victory 
would have entailed. 

However, it was not by any means to Mars 
that our heroine was always sacrificing in this 
militant manner, for one of her mottoes was : 
"With a fan in the hand, a woman is stronger 
than a man with a sword." She could display 
in ample measure all the gentler arts of her sex, 
and could effectually conceal her claws beneath 



Madetnoiselle Mars. 217 

a caressing velvet. Her heart never spilled over 
to an alarming extent ; it was held dryly in 
check by her energetic brain. Her raot — " One 
only gives the hand when he gives the heart " — 
was not to be interpreted literally in her in- 
stance, and one understands quickly how far she 
was from any modern sentimentality, notwith- 
standing her cult of violets, when he learns that 
her favourite author apparently was Saint-Simon. 
She was fond of him because there was nothing 
Eomanesque in his pages. 

We recall another item. Victor Hugo told 
us that there were no letters of invitation to her 
funeral, owing to the difficulty of saying : 
" Mademoiselle Mars is dead. Her son has the 
honour to inform you of the fact." 

In rehearsing these little entrances and exits 
of French social history, one falls to moralizing 
on the character and personal career of Made- 
moiselle Mars, as viewed in the light of our day. 
Her reign of the head, her dryness of the heart, 
her weapon of esprit, her social attractions, and 
her eminently courtly bearing, attach her to the 
era when the court and the salon were in full 
eclat — that is to say, to the ancien regime. To 
speak in general terms, Mademoiselle Mars is to 
the realm of French comedy what Madame de 
Sevig-ne is to the realm of French letters. Both 



2i8 Paris Days and Evenings. 

celebrities are destined to be for ever notable as 
sovereign representatives in France of the 
influence of the court and of the social spirit. 

Women have written epistles which surpass 
those of Madame de Sevigne in a score of senses, 
and yet hers seem, and will ever seem, the 
paragon of a woman's letters. And why ? Since 
they unfold the old traditional conception of 
what an ideal lady — a marquise, for instance — 
should be : one who could say the merest any- 
thing elegantly in a hundred different ways ; one 
who loved the slightest passing events of life, its 
vanities, its nothings, and caused them to appear 
so attractive and essential ; one who was so 
everlastingly a woman, delicate, dependent, to 
be protected, to be cliateaued, to be courted, 
knowing only how to exist gracefully, and know- 
ing only how to take in the world inconsequen- 
tially in delightful, corsaged glimpses. 

Mademoiselle Mars, descending as it were from 
the same regime of court and salon, embodied the 
old, original conception of the comedienne. Her 
social ease and her esprit made her, more than 
any comedienne of any period, the true and 
effective incarnation of the court and salon in 
the theatre. Not only is the salon a court in 
miniature, but the high comedy stage is a salon 
seen by the common public. The salon and high 



Mademoiselle Mars. 2ig 

comedy in Paris were outgrowths of the court, 
and for these three things, as the expression of 
the social spirit, France has ever reigned supreme. 
It is because Mademoiselle Mars somehow per- 
sonified all three more adequately than any 
actress, and was, therefore, a great woman as 
well as a great artiste, that she must remain the 
most celebrated of comediennes in the initial and 
organic French meaning of the word ^and its 
associations. Hence it is with profound truth that 
Duret's statue in the vestibule of the Comedie 
Frangais represents her as if she were an 
eighteenth-century court lady in a salon. She 
was with her tongue what Madame de Sevio-ne 
was with her pen. Both were grandes dames. 

Nevertheless, Mademoiselle Mars is not wholly 
to be excluded from our century. Her career 
presents another aspect. She exemplifies an 
ideal which approaches nearer to us than that 
off'ered by the ancien regime. It may, indeed, 
be called the modern ideal, namely, that a woman 
should be prepared and expect to work out her 
own destiny freely and independently like a man. 
Being no one, and beginning with nothing, Made- 
moiselle Mars, by means of sheer diligence and a 
clear intelligence, won her laurels and held her 
place in the open contest of life. Mundane and 
materialistic, neither better nor worse than her 



2 20 • Paris Days and Evenings. 

time, warfaring, executing flank movements, hot 
here, cold there, she manipulated her varied charms 
and arts as expertly as Napoleon managed his 
battalions on a field of battle. She was a host 
in herself alone, seeking odds of neither man nor 
woman. Surrounded, in the dazzlina; lio;ht of 
publicity, by suitors, friends, enemies, she was 
master of them and of herself, and triumphed 
over everything except anility — much stronger, 
more clever, more resourceful, more brilliant, 
more diversified in her talents than the Madame 
de Sevigne type of woman. She was, in this 
view, a Napoleon in petticoats ; and just as 
Napoleon was the connecting-link between the 
ancien regime and modern French democracy, so 
Mademoiselle Mars was the connecting-link be- 
tween the old and the new type of the Parisian 
actress. 

To appreciate this fully, and to observe at a^ 
glance that Mademoiselle Mars belongs to this 
century only in so far as she was a Bonapartist 
— that she was the ancien regime Bona'partised — 
we have but to remark that she was not Bohemian 
like Eachel, nor Romantic like Madame Dorval, 
nor hourgeoise. For, to put it crudely, French 
Romanticism, which succeeded in a way in France 
as the dominant or prominent fashion to Bona- 
partism and the Empire mode, was made up not 



Mademoiselle Mars. 221 

only of the Romantic, but of the Bohemian and 
of the hourgeoise. 

It is true that Mademoiselle Mars created 
Dona Sol in " Hernani," yet it was simply because 
she had the right to claim the part by reason of 
her long; and commanding services. There was 
nothing of the Dona Sol about her. She was 
not to be becomingly effaced into such a weak 
role of modern romantic sentimentality as this. 
And, in reality, she and Victor Hugo quarrelled 
during the whole series of rehearsals — she in- 
sisted on waving aloft the old white classic 
standards of France, and he insisting on flaunt- 
ing the red flao; of revolution in the air. He was 
twenty-eight years old. She was fifty-one, and 
impersonating a character of seventeen ! 

As a logical example of what we are 
saying of Mademoiselle Mars and our pre- 
sent epoch, there is not an actress in Paris 
in our day who reflects the Mars tradi- 
tion, and whose career can be likened to 
hers. Styles in actresses have changed with 
everything else in our century. Mademoiselle 
Mars is merel}^ a reminiscence of the era in 
France which ended when the Eom antic school 
got complete sway. I was asking, only this 
week, a charming young societaire of the Theatre 
Francais if she had a cult of the memory and 



2 22 Paris Days and Evenings. 

personal art of Mademoiselle Mars, and slie 
seemed to know little of her. And still this 
societaire is the successor of Mademoiselle Mars 
— in the latter's special roles — those of the 
eighteenth century, and of Moliere and Eegnard. 
Mesdames Bernhardt, Bartet, Eeichenberg, E4- 
jane, Hading — none of them can be thought of 
as a Mademoiselle Mars. They are the product 
of nineteenth - century motives and environ- 
ments. 

It does not need to be said that, as the aristo- 
cracy prevailed under the ancien regime, the 
hourgeoisie prevails in the post-Napoleon France. 
Bourgeois qualities, to speak comparatively, 
characterise art, literature, the government, and 
life in France in our period ; and, therefore, 
vis-a-vis Mademoiselle Mars and the tradition 
she represented, the Paris actress to-day is, on 
the whole, hourgeoise. She lives, and desires to 
live, domestically, economically ; and as 6owr- 
geois stands for moral among the French, we 
may safely infer that the modern Paris actress 
either offers a reproachless career, or one which, 
compared with the typical career of her old-time 
predecessors, is less reproachable from the stand- 
point of being morally or statutably comme il 
faut. As the influence of the aristocracy con- 
tinues to dwindle in France, and as that of the 



Mademoiselle Mars. 223 

hourgeoisie continues to increase, more women 
enter the theatrical profession — not as a high 
grade of courtesanship in effect, but as an 
honourable and elevating vocation — one in 
which they can lead successfully self-respecting 
lives. 



Phedre — Rachel and Bernhardt. 

Eachel in "Phedre" is what French genius 
places beside our Bettertons and Booths and 
Irvings in "Hamlet." And who can say that, 
for unadulterated tragedy fit for the stage, 
this role of Eachel's did not surpass all other 
tragic stage performances known to the modern 
era? 

Indeed, we concur in the ranking of Rachel 
as incomparable ; still, we ask our patriotic 
selves, Who of our Anglo-American race could 
ever become so crazed with alien intoxicants as 
to admit, even if he believed it, that our 
" Hamlet " is not the greatest of tragedies ? 
Sooner or later in France one is apt to try to 
pierce into the bowels of this question, and to 
satisfy himself, forgetting as far as he can the 
notion of national bias and of the personal equa- 
tion, that the French, with their Eacines and 
Corneilles, are not entirely left behind in the 
tragic art. This time had come for me. Madame 
Bernhardt was to impersonate Phedre. So the 



Phedre — Rachel and Bernhardt. 225 

evening before, I took out Eacine and went at 
" Phedre " in desperate earnestness, spending a 
whole night in the throes of the play, and de- 
flouring many pages of white paper with tortuous 
lucubrations. A whole night ! — when Rachel 
was five years or more learning the role ! 

You remember that famous little midnight meal 
which Eachel prepared and served on tin plates 
to Alfred de Musset. It was in May 1839. She 
was then eighteen, and he was twenty-nine. 
She had been playing Tancrede at the Fraugais, 
and, always a gamine, had brought Musset home 
with her to supper. Her diamond necklace and 
bracelets caromed around on the table with the 
tin knives and spoons and the salt-cellars. 

Very communicative, and in her best Bohemian 
style, she talked right and left, and told Musset 
that when she was at the Moliere Theatre she 
had only two pairs of stockings, and had to wash 
one pair every morning, and hang it horseback 
on a string across her chamber to dry and be 
ready for the next day. Cooking, gossiping, 
movino; about, eatino- — such w^as Eachel that 
nioiit — banfying the table with her fist, and usino- 
pugilistic language whenever the indigestible 
souvenir of some Philistine critic escaped from 
her lips. And for dessert — she did not have any 
— so she read " Phedre " to Musset. She w^as 

p 



226 Paris Days and Evenings. 

then studying tlie role wliich she was to play 
four years later as the triumph of her life. 

To return to my theme. By dawn I was in 
a fine tragic condition, and had developed into 
the severest of lowering censors, fiercely antique 
in all directions. I had become rigidly Eacinean 
in all the pure rigidity of the conception. I had 
learned in my nightly vigil how " Hamlet," as a 
tragic role, could naturally appear to the French 
wellnigh impossible, or at least impracticable. 
Let us fancy for a moment an unregenerate 
French critic punching a huge aperture through 
its emptiness. Imagine him running on some- 
thing like this : 

"The only thing in 'Hamlet' is the environ- 
ment. Shakespeare made the play as the 
schoolboy would have made a cannon : 'You just 
take a hole,' the boy said, ' and put some bronze 
around it.' Hamlet is a breath, a shadow, an 
aperture, with realities about him. You are not 
interested in him, but in that which surrounds 
him. It is not his affection that you think of, 
but Ophelia, the ideal he might have loved. 
You are not interested in Ophelia, but in the 
incidental externals and decorative occurrences 
which attach to her. role, such as her wreaths of 
flowers, her death by drowning. Hamlet's con- 
science smites him, yet you are only conscious 



Phedre— Rachel and Bernhardt. ^27 

of the form this assumes at the appearance of his 
father's ghost. Mere child's play ! Who wants 
ghosts on the stage ? It shows how, in resorting 
to infantile absurdities, Shakespeare realised the 
weakness of his plot. 

" Remove the surroundings from Hamlet — 

his black garb, his discouraged hose, the 

Elsinore battlements, the night — and there is 

nothing left for a play suited to the boards. He 

commences nowhere and ends nowhere. He is 

a breath of doubt tied in a knot of air. There 

is no action — an unsurmountable defect in a 

tragedy. He is the most celebrated How-Not- 

To-Do-It the world has ever seen. He seems to 

have succeeded because he disastrously failed. 

And so with the other characters. They are as 

unconscious of self as a lady tries to be when 

she rides a bicycle. They are strange creatures, 

not understanding themselves, understood by 

.none of us, propelled by mysterious influences 

and forces which no one has ever pretended to 

comprehend. And what kind of insane stufi" is 

all this to wreath into a tragedy to be presented 

before a sensible, intelligent audience ? In 

England, you know, it does not matter 

particularly, for everybody there is more or less 

mad, as the ' great Will ' himself said." Exit 

our imaginary French critic. 



2 28 Paris Days and Evening^. 

Now behold the contrast in "Phedre." Here 
we must dismiss at once and absolutely all 
notion of environment. No sceneries, no distract- 
ing costumes, no moonlight and music, no side 
eifects enter to pique our curiosity and cater 
to our romantic fancy. The whole play passes 
in one colourless spot and set of costumes, in one 
colourless twenty-four hours, and in one colour- 
less chain of action, according to the Aristotelian 
unities. 

Thus our notice begins to be concentrated 
on the thesis of the piece. Yet we are not to 
stop with this. We are also to strip our play 
of roles, or give it only one. Racine's Phedre 
is not a woman, but an idea. We do not know 
how she looks nor what she wears. It has never 
occurred to anyone to ask if she were blond and 
beautiful. There is not an item which localises 
or personalises her. The other roles are mere 
formalities introduced to accommodate the de- 
velopment of the Phedre motive. 

Our thought is then fixed solely and solidly, 
with the utmost intensity, on the theme of the 
tragedy, namely, the study of an adulterous 
passion. It is an essay played. Bacine clothes 
it in a feminine form for obvious reasons, still in 
such a way as to keep our attention on the 
naked passion itself, and not on any accidents or 



Phedre — Rachel and Bernhardt. 229 

incidents of flesh or environment. Then he pro- 
ceeds in five acts to put this inextinguishable 
desire through five of the supremest trials 
possible to human concejDtion. This lofty 
feminine soul-essence, called Phedre, is to war 
against the masterful love for one other than her 
lawful spouse, who is divined to be lost at sea. 
Fatality has attached this accursed enemy to her, 
and forces her to fight out the hopeless struggle 
alone, with no gleam of faith, with no help of 
deity or man. 

The five crises, or phases, of her passion are 
these. In Act I, she is led to confess her 
adulterous love to her maid. — First crisis. In 
Act II, she reveals it to the man she loves, and 
implores him to .destroy her in her ignominy, 
• — Crisis of despair. In Act III, she agitates her 
fury in her sense of abasement, and resolves to 
consummate her marriage at any cost. The 
announcement of her consort's landing arrives, 
and opens new arenas of horror to her, — Crisis 
of defiant rage afterward, weakening into a 
pitiable terror. In Act IV, she is informed 
that the one she loves, loves another, — Crisis 
of jealousy. In Act V. she is informed of his 
horrible end, and, dying herself, confesses her 
guilt to her consort. — Crisis of death. 

This is the role — the passion — of ' ' Phedre." It 



230 Paris Days and Evenings. 

is nothing but action forward. The audience is 
in full possession of all the facts and motives, 
and is always left in a rational and luminous 
state. There are no fragments, no misunder- 
standings, no obscurities, no shifting philosophy. 
The play has no unrealities of imagination, and 
attempts no excursions into the realm of spirits 
and the unknown. It is apterous, substantia], 
concrete. 

Now give two great, gleaming dark eyes to 
this terrific passion, and, too, a look of dead 
white terror ; let it make seething sounds with 
a powerful voice that haunts you ever after in 
the night ; lengthen it with a dress train that 
lashes rage into the ground ; contort it in the 
sinuousities of an angry serpent, so that when it 
darts toward you from the foot to the front of 
the stage, you instinctively start from your seat 
to dodge for your life — and you have Rachel in 
Phedre ! A python, a pythoness — the unadul- 
terated Racinean conception — antique, fatalistic, 
and whipping her poisoned desperation into your 
very soul. She was ancient tragedy herself, 
more than mortal and less than divine — an 
unsexed fury, embodying a generalised idea of 
earthly weakness : with her strength and sense 
of size, the Greek-epic incarnation of Human 
Passion Bound and Unbound, 



Phedre — Rachel and Bernhardt. 231 

I chance each winter to sit next a venerable 
French lady at the matinees at the Frangais, and 
she often tells me, between the acts, how Eachel 
and the other players of that generation handled 
their roles. She heard Eachel sing the "Mar- 
seillaise " on that memorable occasion ; she never 
saw an actress manage her train with so much 
effect ; and when Eachel used to say to Felix in 
" Polyeucte," " Je suis chretienne," the word 
seemed to express the whole legendary length 
and concentrated force of Christianity, and to 
resound through the room like an admonition 
from heaven. 

The greatest Phedre in our day is Madame 
Bernhardt. After passing my night with the 
play, I set off for the Eenaissance at noon, 
thoroughly imbued with the Eacinean idea and 
the Eachel tradition. I was proposing, in my 
critical humour, to be extremely uncomfortable 
if Madame Bernhardt swerved an instant from 
the role. But when I found that she had placed 
at my disposal a capacious haignoire, in spite of 
the fact that every seat in her theatre was oc- 
cupied, and that my liens upon her notice were 
fragile indeed, my unlovely, vase - breaking 
mood dissipated at once into a sweet and 
airy circumambient, and I sunk back into 
my indulgent fauteuil, prepared to enjoy my- 



232 Paris Days and Evenings. 

self, and love all mankind, whether Racinean 
or not. 

To note with pleasure, therefore, the dis- 
tinguishing traits of the Phedre of Madame 
Bernhardt. It is not antique — it is modern. 
This Phedre is not an essence, an idea, a thesis. 
She is a woman, delicate, fawning, cat-like, senti- 
mental, romanesque. She might dote on Chopin, 
Musset, and Sully Prudhomme. She is a 'poi- 
trinaire, and has a cough that sounds fatefuU}^ 
throughout the tragedy. Tears weave their 
humid gauzes into her role. There is no dry- 
eyed Rachel here. 

Furthermore, the domain of environment is 
tilled scrupulously by Madame Bernhardt. She 
induces everything to play with her and for her. 
Notice the fine cluster of camellias back of her 
chair. They stand up straight and defiant in the 
tragic parts, and droop over lauguidly and 
amorously in the softer passages. Remark those 
two red foot-cushions. They square off" at each 
other in battle array during the pugnacious acts, 
and then, when the curtain rises on a tender 
scene, they appear to be making love like two 
turtles. 

There is, too, her grace, familiar enough to 
every one. How she sylphs across the stage, 
never walking;, never marching- ! Her attitudes 



Phedre — Rachel and Bernhardt. 233 

and movements melt into willowy dissolvings. 
And this grace is wedded to a dreamy, murmur- 
ing, almost dainty lyrism, which quivers in the 
plaintive monotonies of her voice. There is, too, 
her unrivalled cult of the sesthetic. The acts pass 
as symphonies in creams and yellows. Colours 
contrast in unison, and speak roles of their own 
in a harmony of sentiment. The bronzed ugli- 
ness of her maid sets off her own white fragility 
and birth. And she, languid, blond, defeated, 
sways back and dies in the arms of seven black- 
eyed, black-haired young girls, whose fresh 
beauty adds a piquant relief to the wanness 
of a guilty life fading out in sallow despair. 

In all these things Madame Bernhardt 
triumphs, and Rachel had nothing to offer. On 
the other hand, Madame Bernhardt lays no 
claim to Racbel's appalling voice, which was 
as strong and spacious as horror, nor to her 
truly tragic look and air, ominous of catastrophe, 
nor to her sexless epic might and sense of 
expanse — to her gift of seeming a monstrosity. 

Madame Bernhardt is not a Greek, nor is she 
of any past period. No Greek could have loved 
her any more than a modern man could love 
a maid of ancient Greece. Such, at least, was 
the general proposition which some old German 
philosopher — Fichte, was it not? — thought he 



234 Paris Days and Evenings. 

demonstrated. She is the incarnation of the 
romantic and of the most conspicuous species of 
the modern Parisienne. What fantastic episodes, 
wdiat wispy toilets, what wasp-belted, fleeting 
forms of the Frenchwoman are there in our day, 
but that have been inspired by, or found their 
prototype in, Madame Bernhardt ? It is her 
figure and style which one sees pictured in every 
poster in Paris. She has been the Parisian 
model of this whole toiletted class of woman — 
a class which belongs to our epoch, and to no 
other. She was the first, and remains the 
grandest, Parisienne. of all this Jin de siecle. 




LOOE DE MLLE. LUDWIG (COMEDIE FRANCA ISE). 



Mademoiselle Ludwig. 

(1893-4.) 

Many are the true pleasures for tiie sojourner 
in France, and one of them is to remark types 
which impersonate her various epochs. We 
come to Paris with French history, life, and art 
divided more or less distinctly in our minds into 
several periods. There are the areas of Louis 
XIV., Louis XV., Louis XVI., Napoleon, and so 
on. Each reign is signalised by its fashions in 
architecture, in interior decoration, in dress, in 
coiffure. 

Now we find a piquant and singular delight 
in discovering a man or a woman who can 
embody the style and character of one of these 
epochs ; and I know of no one in Paris who does 
so" more charmingly than Mademoiselle Ludwig 
of the Comedie Frangaise. The period of Louis 
XV. was natty and feminine. The model of its 
furniture, with its soft curves, was suggested by 
the sinuosities of the female bust. The whole 
reign seemed perfectly summarised in the court 



238 Paris Days and Evenings. 

ladies of that day — in the piiFy and prinked 
marquises coquetting in one of those royal Re- 
naissance gardens "in five acts," of which Victor 
Hugo was always making such Titanic fun, 
Watteau's gray Finette was an early pattern of 
it all, and we think of the Lancrets and the 
Hilaires in the Louvre when we wish to ac- 
centuate the area neatly in our fancies. 

What a dainty experience, we say to our- 
selves, if we could be in the company of a Louis 
XY, marquise for an evening, and see her tartly 
move about, hear her chatter and laugh, and 
admire the art with which she is perfumed "and 
bepowdered, and the skill with which she has 
clarified her complexion with black patches ! So 
I am fond of watching Mademoiselle Ludwig on 
the boards at the Fran9ais. How did it chance 
that she was born a hundred and fifty years 
after her time ? Does she not feel ill at ease in 
this so-called prosaic age of the bourgeois f Does 
she not long for mates who are ready to dally 
and frisk with her in a Lenotre pleasure-ground ? 
Would she not love to be playing cameo comedies 
ill a little temple of love, or to be flirting in a 
quincunx, or chasing the echoing frivolities ajldng 
the ha-ha in some Bourbon park ? 

The visitor to whom the concierge show.s 
Mademoiselle Luclwig's loge of a morning is 



Mademoiselle Ludwig. 239 

certain that she misses her epoch somewhat, 
for the beautiful apartment is in the Louis XV. 
style, with sculptured and gilded woodwork, and 
mirrors in the panels. Yet he is more certain 
that she can entertain him on the stage with her 
dry prettinesses, with the minute clinkings of her 
crystal laughter, with her miniature sallies of 
petulance and haclinage, with her crimping-iron 
precision, and her courtly, curl-paper hoUowness. 
You do not care whether she could really love or 
be lo.ved, since she represents the period of 
Madame du Deffand, when the heart was dessi- 
cated, and existence was merely a battle against 
ennui. In that age, so largely lacking in serious 
and noble endeavour, the men and women of 
rank appeared to evolve, in France, from flesh 
and blood into powder-pufl"s, pirouetting in a 
cardboard and green - painted Nature. The 
country folk around Versailles no doubt believed 
that the Author of the universe was dressed up 
in a peruque, and that the Virgin Mary wore 
a bang. 

There were two great adepts at comedy-writ- 
ing in Paris in the last century — Marivaux and 
Beaumarchais. Regnard, with his "Allons, saute. 
Marquis ! " belonged to the seventeenth century, 
and Beaumarchais was rather " a part of the 
revolutionary decade. It is in the efi"eminate,' 



240 Paris Days and Evenings. 

affected, grey-ribboned and shoe-pinching come- 
dies of Marivaux that the true aristocratic 
eighteenth century is embalmed. In them the 
little Marquis still comes tripping in, and it is 
still " AUons, saute. Marquis! " but the soubrettes 
are better educated than their mothers and grand- 
mothers in Moliere, and titter forth occasionally 
such words as "heteroclite." It is all volatile 
gallantry and sweet smirkings, and life seems 
made up of pins, tea-roses, and cream-tarts. As 
has been pointed out, woman is both the hero 
and the heroine in Marivaux. Here, as well as in 
plays like Favart's, Mademoiselle Ludwig is .in 
her element. In Favart's " Les Trois Sultanes " 
she can dance the stately minuet, put her arms 
defiantly akimbo, and mock and twitter and 
flutter about saucily to one's most regal 
content. 

We are told that the latest students of the era 
preceding that of the Revolution demonstrate 
that it was not tyranny which destroyed the 
Bourbon dynasty. Indeed, have we ever 
thought that the Louis's were tyrants ? Louis 
XV. and his company were only trivial and 
capricious. Their harmfulness was negative. 
Nations gradually are getting beyond the idea 
of being ruled in that fashion. We no longer 
believe that crimps, lace sleeves, and lavender 



Mademoiselle Ludwig. 241 

insouciance are essential to the best government, 
and prove the divine right of kings. The Louis 
XV. epoch produced an alluring art, and no 
literature is more seductive in its way than the 
memoirs and correspondence of that time. Yet 
it cost too much. The world is learning by 
degrees that national government is largely a 
plain, homely affair of business. This conception 
of it does not make possible such enticing his- 
tories for the desultory reader, but it gives the 
common man and the populace more chance and 
recognition. 

The contrast between the ancient court regime 
and that of the Third Eepublic is brought strik- 
ingly to the notice of anyone who happens to be 
loitering, about four o'clock on a summer day, 
along the highway leading from Fontainebleau 
into the forest. You hear the tinkling of small 
bells. Presently a carriage, with a driver and a 
footman, passes, and President and Madame 
Carnot acknowledge your salutations. That is 
all there is of this equipage of state. Only the 
bells indicate that it is not the conveyance of 
some well-to-do citizen of the town. 

To return to our theme. Having seen 
Mademoiselle Ludwig act so frequently her roles 
of the last century, I had become possessed of 
the idea that she was a woman of a certain age, 



242 Paris Days and Evenings. 

quick,; nervous, scintillating, with a sharp dry- 
tongue that . kept your wits curtly poked up, 
full -master of herself, fond of flattery, of course, 
yet not deceived by it, very mundane and 
disillusioned, living on the vanities and triumphs 
of the world, and too shrewd to fall in love or to 
be loved too seriously. 

It was, therefore, not without much timidity 
that I went to the Avenue Niel for the first time, 
to offer her my compliments as an humble habitue 
of the Theatre Francais. I was ushered into her 
little reception room one afternoon at five. The 
chairs were primly arrayed in white frocks ; there 
were two or three pieces of Trianon furniture ; a 
Bourget novel, with its leaves partly cut, lay on 
a stand ; the walls were hung in yellow. Before 
long I detected the trace of a violet perfume 
sifting into the room, and I knew that the mar- 
quise, whom I had been so curious to see off the 
stage, was about to enter. In another moment 
she was greeting me in a frank and loyal way, 
with a mixture of accomplished grace and girlish 
embarrassment which immediately reassured me. 
I was not slow to remark the harmony that her 
violet negligee, loosely grouped about her, was 
proposing to her violet eyes, twinkling in the 
prettiest of minion-like faces ; nor was I slow to 
enjoy the aesthetic satisfaction of feeling how all 




lOGE PE MLLE. LUDWIG (COMEDIE FRANCAISE). 



Mademoiselle Ludwig. 245 

this blended deliciously with the yellow of the 
apartment. It was a quiet thrill within me of 
gratification at realising something of that artistic 
life for which we come to Paris, and dream of 
finding nowhere more than in the tasteful haunts 
of an actress of the Franyais. 

I explained how I admired her acting, and that 
I had wished on many occasions to tell her so, 
but that, however much I always shuddered in 
committing the crime before the average Parisian, 
it was doubly revolting to think of guillotining 
the French language with my sharp American 
accent in the presence of a societaire. And we 
drifted at once into a cordial conversation. She 
told me how she was attached to her art, and how 
her existence seemed like a day passed in a 
boudoir — in a loge. She was happy to confess 
that she loved the Louis XV. epoch in particular, 
and the Marivaux and Favart roles. She was 
not very modern, she feared. She was not an 
Impressionist, and was not incredulous. She had 
just been reading Bourget. She deemed him too 
sceptical, and still he was perhaps her preference 
among contemporary romancers. For her part, 
she was somewhat "gobeuse." 

"And, being of the eighteenth century, you 
are, of course, not a Eepublican ? " I suggested, 
trying to slip in the sentence innocently. " Oh, 



246 Paris Days and Evenings. 

mais si, I am a Republican — I don't know any- 
thing but Eepublicanism. I am modern, too, in 
that I adore music — yes, much more than paint- 
ing, yet I neither sing nor play an instrument. 
I worship Bizet, Gounod — no, not modern 
enough for Wagner — I understand nothing 
' dans-cette galere.' One reason for it, I suppose, 
is that I have never been in Germany. I have 
travelled little — you know we have no leave of 
absence to speak of at the Francais — I have 
hardly even seen the sea." 

Thus she ran on in her violet voice (if ever a 
voice wore a colour), and confirmed the evident 
fact that the violet was her flower de coeur. 
Pailleron and Meilhac were disclosed to be her 
favourite modern roles : those of " jeune fille 
libre" (independent young girl), like Suzanne de 
Villiers in '* Le Monde ou Ton s'ennuie" — the Re- 
publican girl a VAmericaine evolved, as it were, 
from the youthful Trianon marquise. 

I was charmed to discover that Mademoiselle 
Ludwig was not at all what I expected she would 
be. She proved to be a very young woman ; she 
was leading here, with her father and sister, as 
tranquil a life as possible to an actress ; and she 
showed a youthful openness and trustfulness in 
her elegance of manner — ingenue and grande- 
dame formed into a societaire. She was indeed 



' Pladeinoiselle Ludivig.- 247 

a Louis Quinze marquise, sliglit, tnignccrde, with 
her puff-box gaiety and her light and easily^ 
awakened laughter, yet free from any suspicion 
of marivaudage or of glinting raillery and 
frivolity. 

One day, a few weeks after my call, I learned 
that Mademoiselle Ludwig would be jDleased to 
see me that evening in her loge. She appeared 
in the opening piece, and when the curtain had 
rolled down, I found my way up' three of the 
little flights of stairs which mount to the niches 
of the players. I followed along the row of 
names on the doors until I reached her room. 
The entry was open, and her loge was already full 
of people, who were talking and laughing. As I 
eddied around the entrance, Mademoiselle Lud- 
wig caught sight of me, and called out : " Entrez, 
Monsieur ! " She was in a youth's costume, for 
she had been impersonating Colin- in " Attendez 
moi sous rOrme." T hesitated about wedging in 
among her admirers, and she came forward. Our 
intercommunication ended, she asked if she could 
be of any service to me, fancying that she w^as 
under some obligation. "Oh — no ! " I said, and 
drew away, with her violet voice modestly un- 
folding its " Au re voir, Monsieur" in my ears. 
I was disappointed at being thus deprived of 
passing a quiet quarter of an hour here, not de- 



248 Paris Days and Evenings. 

lighting so much in what she would say, as in 
the way in which she would say it. A societaire 
in her loge / 

As I went minutely down the tiny steps in my 
trifling displeasure, it dawned on me that I was 
oflering a brilliant example of esprit dJescalier, 
since I needed merely to have invented an excuse 
to chat with her, and she doubtless would have 
suggested that I return after the bell for Oedipe 
Hoi had rung her friends to their seats. Esprit 
d'escalier indeed ! The following day I was still 
inclined to indulge in a vexed mood over my 
stupidity, when it finally occurred to me that I 
had only to send up my card the next time she 
played. 



Among Famous Ballet People. 

Now and then, when a mood makes work im- 
possible, I set out at noon in quest of adventure 
and entertainment, often entirely adrift as to 
destination or direction. I visit some museum 
for the thirtieth time, or hunt up some acquaint- 
ance in South Paris, or take a boat bound for 
some terrace, pond, or forest alley that I love, or 
go down to the Cafe de la Regence and twist my 
thoughts and legs round a game of chess with 
some old chess rat who has haunted that resort 
since the time of Morphy and Musset. 

To-day, for diversion, I go under a fine arch, 
across a court in the rear of an enormous edifice, 
and into an entry with the word "Theatre" 
above it. It is the Grand Opera. I offer a 
gesture of recognition to the co7icierge — a jolly 
fellow who is ever playing pranks — and mount 
four flights of stairs to the landing bearing the 



legend : — 



LOGES D'ARTISTES. 
COIFFEURS. 



250 Paris Days and Evenings. 

I fumble through a dark corridor, find my way 
to a door, and grope along a passage to another 
door in which a gimlet hole is corseting a ray of 
light. I hear voices, and rap. " Entrez ! " is 
shouted out, and I open — into a small room 
where three persons are at dejeuner. A hand- 
some young man greets me royally, and every 
one exchanges a honjovr. He places me at the 
vacant side of the table, and insists that I have 
not breakfasted. 

It is the loge of M. Miguel Vazquez, p7"emier 
danseur at the Opera. He and I once made a 
little study of the union of physical grace and 
music, so that we are good friends, and T am 
favoured with the entree to his loge. "You are 
to come just when you like, and to stay as long 
you like," he is always saying to me. It is an 
unpretending loge, strewn with ballet music 
scores, and with check lists for the danseuses to 
sign each day to show that they have been 
present at their lesson. A big bowde knife 
hangs on the wall, a violin is reposing on the 
desk in the corner by the window, and an 
immense lounge occupies one side of the room 
and takes up nearly one fourth of the whole 
space. 

M. Vazquez is very hospitable, and usually 
two or three people slip into breakfast with him. 



Among i^amous Ballet People. 25I 

At my right is Mademoiselle B , a leading 

hallerine. Slie is in ballet costume, but is 
wrapped in a white nubia and a purple opera cape 
lined with white fur. Great white woollen stock- 
ings are drawn up over her legs. Next her sits 
M. Vazquez, senior, a venerable gentleman of the 
old school. He was a danseur in his youth. 
His memories run back to Tagiioni and the 
Elsslers. He appeared on the boards w^ith many 
a famous danseuse — Petra Camara, for instance, 
whom Gautier immortalised in one of his "Emaux 
et Camees," and who is living still to-day in 
Madrid. 

The repast is being disposed of hurriedly, for it 
happens that the final rehearsal of "La Korri- 
gane" is on, and a summons to descend to the 
stage is expected every moment. It is at high 
noon that the ballet at the Grand Opera is con- 
jugated in its inflections of amo, amas, amat. 
Meanwhile I am made to venture on the cruise 
of a cup of coffee, but not without fear and 
trembling, for 1 know by experience that this 
ballet coffee is dangerous - enough to make the 
hair of a buccaneer crisp and curl. The dancers 
say that it gives them their legs. Soon there is 
a knock at the door, and an avertisseur announces, 
"You are wanted below." We file down the 
halls and stairways, and skirt along the coulisses > 



.^^2 Paris Days and Evenings.^ 

where I stop while my friends mix in with their 
comrades on the boards. 

Did you ever view a ballet rehearsal in a vast 
opera house ? It is a fairy-like scene when ob- 
served from a distant box. The theatre is dark; 
the stage is dimly lighted. All is bustle and 
confusion, rejoiced by the cackle of a hundred 
women perched in groups and rows, or flying 
hither aiid thither, and, with their cheese-form 
.jupes, producing the glimmering impression of 
white moths courting a lamp-illumined obscurity. 
This time I see the spectacle close at hand. 
Around me are several women chaperoning the 
danseuses, especially the very young danseuses. 
These tiny maids, proud of their toilets, keep 
buzzing about us. Everybody, exhibiting one 
of the most delightful traits of French courtesy, 
seems unconscious that a stranger is here. The 
maitre de ballet, the amiable M. Hansen, is 
crying out at intervals, "Messieurs, il faut re- 
commencer ! — JVIesdames, en place, s'il vous plait!" 
The regisseur is busy calling names and arrang- 
ing the quadrilles, files, battalions ; and when 
the din becomes too great, he shouts, " Un pen 
de silence! — Un peu de silence!" He addresses 
the young ladies, big and little, bluntly by their 
family titles — " Smith, are you there ? Is Jones 
-No. 2 here to-day ? " 




MLLE. MATIRI. MLLE. SDBRA. MLLS. DE MERODA, 



Among Famous Ballet People. 255 

The quadrilles form and interlace their move- 
ments ; a mime glides inquisitively across the 
boards ; a su^et hovers over the minutiae of some 
intricate step ; M. Va/zquez does a 'pas a deux, 
supporting his danseuse without missing a poise 
or a contact by a hair's-breadth. Then the stage 
is cleared, and in the centre suddenly is seen a 
woman who, in a masterly manner, buffets a 
cycle of pas, and evokes the applause of every- 
one present, for it is Mademoiselle Mauri. 

All the time, two pianists are thumping 
through the musical text, and a leader of the 
orchestra sits by them and furiously beats the 
measure. The various professors of the dance 
occupy chairs by the foot-lights and watch the 
evolutions of their pupils. Eight before me at 
a table are several sujets talking, laughing, and 
snatching glimpses of their future by means of 
cartomancy. Four of them are bunched lightly 
on a bench, and thus offer to one of the sportive 
danseurs too tempting a chance to be resisted. 
So he quietly ties the end of a rope to the bench, 
gets off behind me in the side scene, and gives a 
jerk. The ladies' fall in a kind of snowflake 
bouquet on the floor. For a moment there is a 
brilliant twinkling of arms and legs, while the 
J)Ossessors thereof are spicily engaged in regain- 
ing their perpendicularity. Once on their feet 



256 Paris Days and Evenings. 

they seize, flushed and ruffled in their discom- 
fiture, the nearest objects suitable to their pur- 
pose, and rush out angrily after their tormentor. 
But he has long since fled, and is probably over 
on the opposite side of the stage tying another 
rope to another bench of bare-armed and ribbon- 
headed beauties. 

In an hour the rehearsal is over, and everyone 
is vanishing between the huge stacks of sceneries. 
M. Vazquez joins me on the way upstairs, saying: 
" Can't you stay to my class— four o'clock ? I 

want you to see Mademoiselle L dance. 

She is going to take a lesson to-day — she repre- 
sents the traditional danse noble in all its 
nobility." So we return to his loge to while 
away the time until four o'clock. We lounge 
about, talk, finish the buccaneer cofl"ee. My friend 
would have us believe that the ennuis of beins; 
a dancer are many and great, and that the arena 
of the ballet is an arena, and not a couch of roses. 
He maintains that the theatre dance is in full 
decadence. His father, however, is optimistic, 
and tells us that the ballet of our decade 
averages as well as ever — even better than ever. 
We prevail on him to revive his souvenirs and 
picture Fanny Elssler and Eosati to us. 

Every few moments some one comes in, as 
this loge is a sort of headquarters in this domain. 



Among Famous Ballet People. 257 

Now perhaps it is a youthful danseur who wishes 
to know if he did his 'pas right, " You should 
dance it more like this," responds M. Vazquez, 
and he forthwith gets up and illustrates what he 
means, profiting by the suggestions of his father, 
who is a kind of mentor for the whole ballet. 
Then perhaps a plainly-dressed young woman 
enters and is invited to partake of coffee. One 
discovers, in spite of her everyday lineaments and 
garb, that she is a siijet whose grace is often 
noticed on the stage. 

As the hour for the lesson approaches, the 
pupils commence to congregate. In saunters, 
for instance, a green-eyed Bussian girl, to in- 
quire if the lesson is to be given in one of the 
rooms in the roof, or down in the foyer de la 
danse. She is the daughter of a well-known 
singer. Her chaperon is her grandmother, who 
is a magnificent-looking old lady. I feel not 
unacquainted with the members of the class of 
M, Vazquez and the habitues of his loge, so, as 
Mademoiselle lingers, I ask her, for the sake of 
saying something : " You are a coryphee, are 
you not, Mademoiselle?" "Oh no. Monsieur." 
"What, ?i[.ve?i^Y 2i. petit sujet — a sitjet?" "Oh 
no. Monsieur," she replies, with an aristocratic 
shrug ; " I don't belong to the ballet — I wouldn't 
belong to a ballet, I ani not going to dance in 

R 



258 Paris Days and Evenings. 

public until I am an etoile.'' "Oh! you are to 
leap right over the intermediary ranks — that's 
pleasant to think of." She smiles with satisfac- 
tion, and her green eyes scintillate. 

Another pupil, who always comes in about 
half-past three with her mother, is Mademoiselle 
Lili, a pretty, red-cheeked girl of eleven. She 
retires to a closet adjoining the loge, and, to hear 
the conversation, appears at her door every few 
moments with one more layer of raiment off or 
on as the case may be. Her mother is a bright- 
faced, amiable lady, and the father is a member 
of the ballet — all as respectable and serious 
people in their way as any in the world, for the 
corps de ballet is composed of good and bad. 
I ask Madame how she happened to let her 
daughter select the dance for a profession. " We 
gave her the choice of being a piano-teacher or 
a halleriiie, and she preferred to dance. Why ? 
Oh, because she liked to wear fine skirts ! " 

And Mademoiselle Lili finally promenades out 
before the mirror in front of us, and begins ad- 
justing her corsage, and striking attitudes. What 
revelling in white banks of tulle ! She spends 
an hour daily merely donning and doffing her 
airy costume. I say to her: "Now, Mademoiselle 
Lili, when you make your debut, send me a line, 
and I will come and applaud." She glances 



Among Famous Ballet People. 259 

stupidly at me, for slie never says more than " Oiii, 
Monsieur," or "Non, Monsieur," and it is diffi- 
cult to extract even tliese words from her. Her 
mother replies : "You must thank Monsieur — it 
is very kind of him." And Mademoiselle Lili 
keeps fussing with her jupes, and occasionally, 
as she buries a safety-pin in them, pretends to 
prick herself, and looks up, expecting us to be 
amused. 

As I idle on the sofa in this loge of a danseur, 
and muse on this strange little world eddying 
about me, I realise how different it is from the 
world at large, and from my own microcosm. I 
nearly always feel out of place in these haunts, 
and say to myself, "This will be my last visit." 
And then some day in two or three months, 
when a fit of supi-eme loneliness takes possession 
of me, I think of the youth and liveliness of my 
light-footed friends, of the gay strains of music 
that echo in their realms, of the lights and 
mirrors and white tulle, and so I am apt to come 
here for the afternoon, and drink of this eau de 
Joiivence. 

For the main charm of it all is youthfulness. 
The old are young, and the young are very in- 
fantile. Almost every one is disposed to laugh, 
to aerate his thoughts with gestures, to act and 



26o Paris Days and Evenings. 

curvet like a cliild. You are as refreshed as if you 
were among a company of girls and boys. Mix 
in with this the constant displa}^ of some native 
grace, and also much acquired grace set off quite 
freely with the elegant and spacious manners of 
the ai'icien i^egime, and one has a pleasing spec- 
tacle well calculated to make him forget a heavy 
hour. 

No one, so far as I know, has ever tried to 
examine fully into the natural history of the 
ballet performer — of the ballet girl, we may say 
nowadays, for the danseur has rather been 
eclipsed by her. Dr V^ron, the famous Director 
of the Grand Opera from 1831 to 1834 or 1835, 
devoted a long chapter to the theme in his 
Memoires, and detailed many interesting facts 
and curious traits, which showed that ballet 
people in his day were a class by themselves. 
He recognised that the balle^ine, in her love for 
costume and tinsel, was one of the sex qui 
shahille, habille et se deshabille. He remarked 
that, owing to the uncertainty of their destinj^, 
ballet women were very superstitious, and wore 
an amulet around the neck or a finger. " Nearly 
all of them," he wrote, " go to the mass, and burn 
many candles at the altar of the Virgin." What 
he noted especially was their pretension to par- 
ents and to kith and kin. For this reason, they 



Among Famous Ballet People. 261 

were almost happy to wear mourning, and proud 
to tell a comrade tliat they had lost a cousin or 
an aunt. He knew dcmseuses to dress in black 
in memory of a deceased maid-servant, a dog, or 
even a concierge, so far did their ambition to 
possess a family go. 

He emphasised the charitableness of his chore- 
graphic nymphs, and their quick sympathy for 
those in misery. They were ever circulating 
subscriptions to help some one of their company 
who had fallen into neglect. So prolific were 
they of little enterprises of succour, that he 
said there is in the ballet girl something of 
a Sister of Charity. He discovered a greater 
inclination among hallerines to get rich than 
among singers. A larger number of his baya- 
deres than would be imagined were married, led 
frugal, bourgeois existences, and followed their 
vocation as an honest one. But many of them 
had no idea of the value and use of money, and 
he cited the instance of one who, instead of 
spending her first banknote for the necessities 
of life, after years of the severest privation, in- 
vested in a supply of pineapples, a King Charles, 
and a parrot ! 

He wrote that most of his danseuses were 
unschooled and ignorant, yet some of them were 
well educated, having been taught to sing, play 



262 Paris Days and Evenings. 

the piano, and speak English. He had seen 
hallerines reading Madame de S^vign^, Eousseau, 
Chateaubriand. The members of the decorative 
part of the ballet were called, in his epoch, " Les 
marcheuses." As they were a new feature in 
those days — a result of the Romantic cult of 
environment — the ballet proper treated them 
with contempt. The younger pupils of the 
dance were nicknamed "rats," because they were 
always running about and nibbling crusts of 
bread, apples, bonbons. 

Were Dr V^ron now living, he would find that 
"rats" and "marcheuses" are obsolete terras. 
The word "marcheuse" has been supplanted by 
"figurante." He would find, also, that the ex- 
isting corps de ballet is two or three times the 
size of his of sixty years ago, and that the chan- 
teuses in our epoch manifest more of a disposition 
to grow wealthy than the danseuses. He would 
notice, doubtless, the same trait of charitable- 
ness among the present hallerines as among those 
of his period ; but he would probably remark 
that the former are less superstitious than were 
the latter, and also less devout, since very few of 
them, I am told, burn candles at any altar. 
Most, if not all, of the hallerines of to-day still 
make, from faith or habit, the sign of the cross 
before entering on the stage, yet it would appear 



Among Famous Ballet People. 26 



o 



that only about one half of them go to mass 
even once a week, and as for the rest, they go it 
quite as they please, with some such flippant 
phrase as " heads or tails " for a shibboleth. 

Dr Veron confirmed the traditional statement 
that ballet dancing tends to destroy the beauty 
of face and form, for it thins the upper parts of 
the body by dragging them down, as it were, 
into its lower regions. Herein Nature merely 
adapts itself to the circumstance, and strives to 
attain the desired end, because the upper half of 
the person should be light to permit grace and 
airiness in a danseuse. 

To the question. Does dancing numb the heart 
and chill the esprit and imagination ? Dr Veron 
answered No ! Nor did he agree with Lemontey, 
who wrote ; "In the danseuse, the ' esprits ' des- 
tined to nourish the fire of the passions and the 
working of the brain are turned from their route. 
The kind of enchantment which seems to sur- 
round her does not really exist; no 'moral' 
[in the French sense] stimulant counteracts the 
sluggishness or torpor into which the excess of 
the dance throws the organs of sensibility." 

The contrary view held by Dr Veron has 
threefold weight — that of a physician, that of a 
director of the Opera and therefore of the ballet, 
and that of a patron of the dance from a love of 



264 Paris Days and Evenings. 

it. If I had to offer an opinion in the matter, I 
should say that he is right. Lemontey evidently 
treated the theatre dance wholly as a gymnastic 
art. This is too narrow a conception, for there 
is in it so much that reacts asfainst the brutal- 
ising tendencies of acrobatism. The danseuse 
virtually lives in a domain of rornance of the 
ideal. Her roles, woven entirely of fancy and 
emotion, her theatrical environment of magnifi- 
cent sceneries, of magic illuminations and of 
fairy costumes, her constant aim to delight 
spectators, all cultivate her sentimental sensibili- 
ties and imagination. She learns the seductions 
of grace and dress, and even her hours of toil are 
accompanied by — wedded to — visional music 
frequently of a fine, inspiring quality. 

The average hallerine at the Opera, as I have 
said, strikes one as something of a child. 
Apparently she acts on the impulses of caprice 
and of the moment, forgets what she did yester- 
day, has slight thought of to-morrow, is quick to 
laugh or cry, to be pleased or offended, to sym- 
pathise and forgive, and is pronounced, for the 
time being, in her friendships and enmities, in 
her likes and dislikes. She, then, would seem to 
enchant and disenchant in reality [i.e. off the 
stage) in the manner of children ; for to know 
a child well is to be disillusioned, in a measure, 



Among Famous Ballet People. 265 

as to the fascination of the very young, and still 
their charm remains, in general, most certain and 
unquestioned. 

It is curious that the Parisians manifest com- 
paratively little enthusiasm for the ballet. 
There is only one place in Paris where people go 
to see the ballet, and that is here at the Opera. 
True, the Acad^mie nationale de musique et de 
danse has ever depended noticeably on dancing 
for its abidiDg interest ; but the Opera-Comique 
does not court Terpsichore, and the quadrilles at 
the other theatres are incidents, not permanent 
attractions. AVhile London supports two im- 
mense ballets, and Milan and Vienna are 
renowned for the art, the one huge display of 
this spectacular sort attempted in Paris in recent 
times ended a few years ago in bankruptcy. 
You would naturally say, without giving the 
matter a second thought, that the French are 
ardent lovers and patrons of the dance ; yet this 
does not appear to be the case, in spite of the 
fact that they have contributed so much to its 
development. Its technical exp]-essions are 
French. M. Vazquez and I have broached once 
or twice to Mademoiselle Mauri the question of 
this French indifference, and she maintains that, 
however it may be, it is not due to any dimness 
of the constellation of which she is the central 



266 Paris Days and Evenings. 

star. Her criticism on the Milan ballets is that 
they indulge in too many features and move- 
ments. In this she agrees, of course, with 
Parisian taste. 

You may imagine that perhaps the French 
find the ballet lacking in artistic ideality, and 
your fancies may venture to trace the evolution^ 
of the modern muse from the antique. As we 
recall the dancing women in the frescoes of 
Pompeii, or Raphael's Hours, or loiter among the 
Atalantes in the Louvre, a deep sense comes over 
us of the loss to our civilisation of something of 
wholesome refinement and infinite grace. In 
place of all that beautiful world of human 
motion we merely have the ballet. The difference 
is apparently so marked that we cannot refrain 
from condemnina; at once our modern institution 
in emphatic terms. But they are hasty terms, 
for there is a great deal of difficult and estimable 
art in the nineteenth century ballet. 

One explanation of the conspicuous contrast 
between the Greek and the modern Terpsichores 
is to be remarked in the decline of the art of 
drapery. The attire formed a signal part of the 
antique dance, and has largely disappeared in 
the ballet, because quickness of action has therein 
supplanted the calmness which evidently dis- 
tinguished the Hellenic dance. A true com- 



Among Famous Ballet People. 267 

panion of rliytlimic saltation, under the ancient 
conditions, was a long light robe, which played a 
beautiful and natural role. The folds of the 
garments spoke volumes^ as all those who are 
familiar with Flaxman's lectures will rem^ember. 
In the stately rising and descending Irises and 
Callirrhoes, for instance, the garbs express as 
much nobility and temj)erate grace as do the 
attitudes of G-reek statues. 

A gorgeous revival of drapery in the dance 
has been created of late years by an American. 
Here lab5^rinthine vestures are brought into the 
most lively and intricate movement. In this 
manipulation of costume, the 'pas amount to 
nothing. The textures are put into flight by 
the hands ; they are painted in various hues to 
conform to the varieties of the performance, such 
as the butterfly dance and the violet dance ; 
and to these effects are added the marvels 
of prismatic illuminations. Altogether, it is a 
perfect vision of rare colours, and of ravishing 
festivities of abundant apparel twirling in cas- 
cades or whirling in sinuous racings. Mr Eider 
Haggard would have considered himself fortunate 
if he had beheld this spectacle when writing 
" She." We observe here again that modern im- 
petuosity is insisted on. The garments are kept 
constantly soaring in the most rapid curves and 



268 Paris Days and Evenings. 

convolutions, and one may behold how much they 
may be made to interpret by agitation, in con- 
trast to the Hellenic art, wherein the draperies, 
it would seem, were made to speak more par- 
ticularly of tranquillity. 

After all, one may criticise and denounce the 
aesthetics of the nineteenth century dance, yet 
an audience of our day would not long be content 
to witness the slow evolutions of even Pompeian 
nymphs. We are too restless for such an 
indolent scene. Modern music and inquietude 
and our great creed of responsibility, inevitably 
develop a dance entirely different from that 
which was demanded by the Greeks, with their 
love of artistic repose and their creed of fatality. 
The more one examines into the complicated 
phases of the ballet, its scope, energy, diver- 
sity, the more one discovers that it is in accord 
with the spirit and traits of contemporary life ; 
and he can but conclude that, on the whole, 
it holds its own with any other department of 
nineteenth century art. It suits this business 
age, where nervous activity and convenience lay 
down the laws. The present pattern of the 
ballet will not quit us until the swallowtail does. 



The hour arrives for the lesson of M. Vazquez 



Among Famous Ballet People. 269 

— four o'clock. Some one knocks and opens the 
door. It is an avertisseuv, who says : " Gentle- 
men and ladies, the foyer de la danse is at your 
disposal." We descend to that sumptuous room. 
The world of dance has never seen its equal. 
Thick portieres drape the entrance ; the elabo- 
rately carved woodwork is gilded with gold ; the 
side walls are adorned wdth ambitious paintings 
by Boulanger ; medallion portraits of famous 
danseuses coin the cornice ; heavy chandeliers 
hang in rich crystal displays ; and a vast St 
Gobain mirror covers the end wall, giving a 
palatial stretch to all this pageantry. Electric 
lights punctuate at intervals the munificent 
elegance of the scene, for no daylight, of course, 
ever penetrates here. The floor slopes at the 
same angle as the stage, and is carefully 
sprinkled. Velvet-covered bars, with a gilded 
knob at each tip, line the room, and spacious 
settees and fauteuils sink in luxury behind them 
for the weary performers. 

Five or six girls take their places at the bars, 
and begin their exercises. The accompanist 
skirmishes over the keyboard of the piano. 
Fin^ll}^, in sweep two ladies. One of them is 

Mademoiselle L , whose danse nohle I will 

admire, M. Vazquez has told me. She is a tall, 
strong person possessing a sovereign carriage, 



o 

270 Paris Days and Evenings. 

and manners, and is encircled in furs and a boa, 
with points of laces afloat here and there. 
Everyone exclaims under breath: "Ah! there 

is Mademoiselle L ." M. Vazquez favours 

me with a presentation to her, and then to 
her sister — a marquise — who is chaperoning 
her. 

The lesson commences, and develops the daily 
pretensions of the young ladies to sprained 
ankles and sore limbs. They dread the severe 
'pas, and really are not feeling well to-day. M. 
Vazquez is pitiless and savage, and listens to 
no complaints. Evidences of simple, childlike 
human nature are seen in refreshing abundance. 
It is a favourite way with a hallerine to appear 
to have slipped on something when she does not 
succeed in an evolution. M. Vazquez will pick 
up and hold to view the imaginary obstacle, and 
say ! " A-h ! no wonder you slipped ! " and every- 
one will giggle save the person in question. Now 
and then one of the pupils, in a tour of steps, 
will be beholding herself in the gigantic mirror, 
rather than nourishing the details of her ronds 
de jambe and jetes-battus. A mirror is the 
greatest flatterer of a danseuse, for it unfailingly 
reflects her as the perfection of grace and beauty. 
At length M. Vazquez will address the young 
lady : "My dear friend, why do you keep look- 



Among Famous Ballet People. 271 

ing in the glass and neglecting your attitudes ? 
Because you are under the impression that you 
are pretty % You probably will be some day, 
but at present you are decidedly plain ! " 

All moves during the lesson in the intimacy of 
a conspiracy to fascinate the outside world, and 
if a young woman, in an energetic evolution, 
chances to drop a trace of cotton from her bosom, 
no one is disillusioned or thinks anything of it. 
After a while I approach the imperial Mademoi- 
selle L to venture a compliment on her ballon. 

She is standing at her bar, vigorously wiping the 
perspiration from her face, and vociferates with a 
superb enunciation as I draw near, " Quel sale 
metier ! " (What a nasty profession !) 

The hour finished, I invite M. Vazquez to a 
cafe, and wait for him to mount to his loge for his 
hat. When he reappears he has a lady on either 
arm — companions I had not expected. We re- 
pair to a cafe in the Boulevard Haussmann. The 
ladies are his pupils, and are two hallerines whose 
names frequently figure on the posters in big 
type, like the names of Madame Caron or M. 
Lassalle. Suddenly M. Vazquez discovers that 
he has left his ring in the theatre, and darts 
across the street in quest of it, confiding his 
Sieves to me to be distracted in his absence. 

Have you ever had two French danseiises 



272 Paris Days and Evenings. 

abruptly thrown in your sole colloquial charge ? 
If so, you may know how to pity my secret con- 
fusion, and my fear tliat M. Vazquez may neglect 
to return. What subject shall I launch upon ? 
What shall I say? At length I set the conversa- 
tion afloat on the theme of ballet music. One of 
the young ladies quickly proves to be very grace- 
fully prepared to discuss the various phases of 
her art with intelligence. Their testimony is 
that Saint-Saens, Reyer, Ambroise Thomas, and 
Massenet (except occasionally in an exquisite 
strain) are not to be danced ; and that after 
Delibes, the king of ballet music, comes Gounod, 
and then follow Rossini, Meyerbeer, Verdi, in 
any order you please. 

M. Vazquez soon rejoins us. It is getting 
dark, and we must separate. I bid them " Au 
revoir," remarking that I suppose they are on 
the arches to-day. " Oh, yes," respond the 
young ladies, " we dance in ' Faust ' to-night." 
As I traverse the boulevard I catch a glimpse 
over my shoulder of the frisky silhouettes of M. 
Vazquez and his pupils as they turn into the Rue 
Lafayette in the evening breeze. And there 
strike up within me the strains of the Faust 
waltz, together with memories of Auerbach's 
Keller, in which I once passed a midnight. 
"We dance in 'Faust' to-night." The words 



Among Famo2is Ballet People. 273 

seem to weave a vision of the " Walpurgisnacht- 
straum" across my fancy from the Bastei to 
the Harz — to the Brocken, where the ever 
unlucky Heine " viewed the mist and missed 
the view." 



THE LATIN QUARTIER. 







\ The Quartier 
by Day. 

Louis XIV. once 
asked De Grammont 
to read Jansen's 
book, and see if lie 
MARCHE Aux FLEUKs. couM find lu it the 

celebrated Five Propositions, about wbicli there 
was so much hierarchical fulminating in those 
Port Royal days. In due time De Grammont 
reported that if the Propositions were there, they 
must be there incognito, for he had not recog- 
nised them. Thus it is with the Latin Quartier. 
Everyone " sees " that famous part of the French 



2/8 Paris Days and Evenings. 

capital, where Classic Bohemianism and inexpen- 
sive gaiety flourish, but to nearly all visitors the 
Quartier appears incognito, since the district 
seeras, to the uninitiated, like many other wards 
of the city. The stranger who conies to Paris 
has a burning desire to view this Latin domain, 
and he invariably leaves the metropolis with a 
feeling of disappointment at having made a dash 
or two through these precincts, and remarking 
little that fulfilled his expectations. " Oh, yes, 
we saw the Latin Quartier," usually has as 
much signification as saying "we saw the 
moon " ! 

There are two ways in which to visit this 
corner of Paris and know something of it. One 
way is to make the acquaintance of a student, 
and ask him to guide you on your tour of inspec- 
tion through this Bohemia. The other way is to 
wander through this, the intellectual nursery of 
France, and look up the spots which history and 
literature have made familiar to mind. The 
former is an excursion for the evening ; the 
latter is an excursion for the daytime. 

Let us stroll, on the day trip, along the Rue 
St Jacques, through the very heart of the Latin 
Quartier, from north to south, and note what the 
hurried or indifi'erent sightseer will probably not 
notice or know of. We start at the foot of this 



The Quartier by Day. 279 

street,' where tlie Little Bridge (" Petit-Pont ") 
spans tlie Seine from the square of Notre-Dame. 
By the way, this bridge is historically one of the 
most interesting of all the half hundred bridges 
of Paris. It fell in, in 1206, 1280, 1296, 1325, 
1376, and 1393 ; and in 1718 it burned down, 
thanks to a curious bit of credulity. Mr Hammer- 
ton tells the story as follows : — 

"Now it so happened in that year 1718. in 
the month of April, thai a woman had lost her 
son by drowning, and that her grief was greatly 
increased because she could not find his body ; 
wherefore the good folks, her neighbours, told 
her of a sure method by which drowned bodies 
might be found, and she believed and obeyed 
them. She took a sebille — which is a thick 
round wooden tray or dish ; she stuck a taper 
upright in it, which she lighted, and with the 
taper she put a piece of blessed bread, the whole 
in honour of St Nicholas ; she then confided her 
little boat to the current and watched its course. 
It floated straight to a barge loaded with hay, 
the taper set fire to the hay, the men in the 
barges near to it severed the rope that fastened 
it in order to save their boats ; and now, instead 
of the little votive taper in its wooden dish, a 
great blazing haystack floated quickly down to 
the Petit Pont, where it was stopped by the 



28o Paris Days and Evenings. 

wooden piles under the arch. These soon caught 

fire, and so did all the houses." 

The Eue St Jacques doubtless follows the 

line of the great Koman highway that led from 

Eome toward Britain. Here on our left, as we 

face south, is the Eue du Fouarre, the original 

haunt of the ancient clerks of the Basoche, and 

also of Villon and his fellows, who lived lives of 

such gay rascality. Perhaps it was in this street 

that Villon wrote those lines which are always 

being quoted : — 

" Dictes moy, ou, n'en quel pays 
Est Flora la belle Eomaine ? 

Mais oil sont les neiges d'antan % " 
The Eue du Fouarre was, one may almost say, 
the home of the queer French moralities and 
mysteries, which played such a quaint role in 
the development of the theatre from the bosom 
of the church in France. This " Straw Street " 
figures in the history of Pantagruel, and in 
Petrarch. The tradition or legend of Dante 
pursuing his studies here under one Sigier, whose 
eternal light took the form of syllogistic and 
invidious verities, is familiar to the student of 
" l)el Paradiso : — 

" Essa e la luce eterna di Sigieri 

Che leggendo nel vico degli strami 

Sillogizz6 invidiosi veri." 



The Qtiartier by Day. 281 

Only one side of the short Rue du Fouarre is 
left to tell its mediaeval tales. Brand-new Paris 
lias demolished the other side, and boldly jfiiaunts 
the twentieth century in the face of this old, 
picturesquely - roofed epoch. In the next few 
steps we saunter into a section of Paris of the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is a 
labyrinth of twisting alleys, which are from ten 
to fifteen feet wide. The ancestral houses lean 
over affectionately on each other, or bow across 
the way to their neighbours. The rheumatism 
of the ages is attacking the joints of their stories, 
and makes their fagades present a variety of 
obliquity. 

Here Coleridge's seventy-two stenches of the 
town of Cologne greet us, and we are happy to 
discover among them some of the delightful 
odours of certain Italian cities that we love. In 
the middle of this quartier are two churches. 
Saint Julien-le-Pa,uvre dates so far back that 
they can scarcely find the century to which it 
belongs. They believe it existed before 580 a.d. 
The chajDel, which is about all there is now 
visible of the edifice, seems to have been rebuilt 
under Henry I. about 1050. In its precincts 
nowadays they dig up plastered tombs and 
unearth sepulchres formed of shelved recesses 
built over each other and resembling the drawers 



282 Paris Days and Evenings. 

of a bureau. In its yard there is a well whose 
waters were once widely known for their curative 
powers. Around and about the chapel are car- 
penter shops, livery stables, arid hen - roosts. 
The people hereabout lead lives verging on filth 
and misery. 

A few feet off is the rather flourishing, ancient 
church of Saint Severin, which still exploits 
superstition in a way quite worthy of the Middle 
Ages. The choir is covered with rnemorative 
tablets, bearinsf leojends like these — all addressed 
to the Holy Virgin for her aid in helping through 
a pinch : " A Thankful Bachelor of Arts " ; " For 
my Success in Examinations"; "Marriage De- 
sired, Marriage Acquired." Near by is the Cafe 
du Palais, where the banquets of the "Plume" 
are held. On our left is the Square Maubert, 
now a clean, bright place, but notorious until 
within a few years for its shimmy haunts. 

On our way south up the hill, continuing the 
course along the Kue St Jacques, we cross the 
Boulevard Saint - Germain and approach the 
Cluny. We recall thab a Roman amphitheatre 
was discovered in 1869 in opening up the Pue 
Monge not far away. It faced and overlooked 
the Paris of the Island. They were sure that 
there was an amphitheatre in Roman Paris, 
because the cit}^ had two imperial Roman palaces. 



The Qitartier by Day. 283 

yet its location was not known until twenty-five 
years ago. Unfortunately, it has been covered 
up again, so that it is wholly lost to sight. Close 
by it is St Nicholas du Chardonnet, into whose 
little seminary Eenan entered when he came to 
Paris as a lad. 

While we are passing the Cluny, we call to 
mind that Musset was born in its vicinity in a 
street which no longer exists. You remember 
that pretty story told of the poet's earliest youth. 
" Mamma, are we going again next Sunday to 
see the comedy of the Mass?" he innocently 
asked, after having been taken to a cathedral for 
the first time. 

We now traverse the Rue des Ecoles, which 
runs along in front of the Sorbonne and the 
College de France. A rod or two away on our 
rio;ht was located Marat's house where Charlotte 
Corday made her fatal call. The nook was quite 
the home of the leaders of the Revolution, for Dan- 
ton and Desmoulins, as well as Marat, lived here. 
It is celebrated in a well-known students' song — 
''• In the Hotel at No. 3 "— 

" Les draps soiit grands comm' des serviettes, 
Et c'est I'chien qui lav' les assiettes, 
A I'hotel de numero trois." 

[The sheets are as big as napkins, and it's the dog that 
washes the plates, in the hotel at Ko. 3.] 



284 Paris Days and Evenings. 

George Sand had her modest apartment in this 
neighbourhood when she sojourned in Paris. 

We move on between the Sorbonne and the 
College de France. Some one was pointing out 
the Sorbonne to Casaubon with solemnity one day, 
casually remarking that this was the place where 
they held world-echoing discussions for centuries. 
"And what did they conclude?" he asked. He 
hit the nail on the head beautifully, because 
they never were able to reach a conclusion 
through all those long generations of angry 
debate. Our attention was recently called to 
the fact that the Sorbonne never produced a 
book which embodied its spirit and influence. 
All its ideas and eloquence simply disappeared 
in the air. As we idle along, we must bid adieu 
to the old Sorbonne of Kichelieu's time, for it is 
being torn down. There are three Sorbonnes — 
the one that was built in the time of Eobert 
Sorbonne, about 1260 ; the one that was con- 
structed in its place under Eichelieu ; and the one 
that is now being erected on the self-same plot 
of ground under the Third Republic. 

Near by is the squalid little Hotel J. J. 
Rousseau, where Rousseau found Theresa le 
Vasseur. Going on past the Pantheon we stroll 
by the spot where Jean de Meung wrote the 
" Roman de la Rose," about the year 1300. The 



The Quartier by Day. 285 

street Royer-CoUard recalls De Vigny's refresh- 
ing account of his visit to get the vote of the old 
Academician in 1842. The philosopher took 
pride in declaring in this interview that he was 
at an age when one does not read anything new, 
and that he had read nothino; that had been 
written since 1812. 

We get over the crown of the hill after 
crossing Eue Gay-Lussac. In this street lives 
Mounet-SuUy. The great southern slope of 
South Paris begins now, with the oldest elm-tree 
in the city (one hundred feet high, and planted 
in 1605) on our right hand, and on our left the 
imposing Val-de-Grace, with its magnificent dome 
in imitation of that of St Peter's, and with its 
renowned and faded fresco by Mignard. In this 
votive structure is the tomb of Henrietta, wife 
of Charles I. of England, over whose remains 
Bossuet pronounced that immortal discourse. 

Here the Latin Quartier ends. Near where 
we stand was the garden — the Feuillantines — in 
which Victor Hugo passed so many of his boy- 
hood days. It appears again and again in his 
verse. It was the cradle of his muse. Here, 
too, was located, in the domain of Balzac, the 
pension where Pere Goriot stayed. The Rue 
Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve I have never discovered, 
but the Rue de I'Arbalete, and the pitching 



286 Paris Days and Evenings. 

incline of tlie ground, are still to be seen, all as 
described in the first pages of the book. I have 
often wandered along here, looking at the houses, 
and wondering if I might not see one that 
resembled Madame Vauquer's establishment. 
The Quartier has greatly improved since Balzac's 
day, and the sleepy buildings are respectable 
enough ; but the lover of Pere Goriot would 
quickly give them all either to meet Vautrin 
coming along the street and humming his- 

" J'ai longtemps parcoiiru le monde," 

or to spy the announcement on one of these 
doors : — " House Vauquer — Bourgeois Pension 
for Both Sexes and Others." 



The Quartier by Night. 

We will now put a little cotton in our pockets, 
if you wish, and set out for the Latin Quartier on 
an evening excursion. If we chance to follow 
the route via Pont-Neuf, we pass by a tavern 
which, although not in the Quartier, is visited by 
the students after they have had their annual 
examinations. It is called the House of Mother 
Moreaux, and claims to have been founded in 
1798. Mother Moreaux was one of the non- 
descript women who follow armies. She trailed 
over almost all Europe in the wake of the 
French soldiery. The Grovernment finally gave 
her a pension, and she opened this shop. 

Let us step in. It has an attractive ceiling 
and a marble floor, for it has been fitted up in a 
rather costly style in late years. It is, perhaps, 
the only inn in Paris where guests cannot sit 
down. Wine is served, if desired, but neither 
coifee, milk, nor any of the favourite beverages 
of the typical cafe can be had. Its specialty is 
fruits in cognac. All the fruits in the horti- 



2 88 Paris Days and Evenings. 

cultural calendars can be seen here swimming in 
liquor. They are commonly reputed to be the 
best in Paris. Mother Moreaux's plums in 
cognac seem to have the widest local renown. 
Physicians often say when they are at their wits' 
end: "Go and take a plum at Mother Moreaux's," 
and thus the inn has built up a thriving business. 
It occupies a building of three or four stories, 
and has an establishment at Charenton w^here 
the goods are put up. 

We ask for a plum, and engage the young 
serving-maid in conversation. She says their 
brandied articles are exceptionally fine, because 
the fruit is of a prime order. People of all 
classes drop in for a tipple, and we notice that 
we happen to be in company with a cabman, a 
common working-man, and two or three persons 
belonging to the 'petite bourgeoisie. At length 
we ask what we are to pay for this fine large 
plum which has been set out before us in a neat 
cup of cognac. "Two sous" — astonishingly 
cheap, when you consider that we have been con- 
versing for five minutes with a promising young 
woman, who gently insists on interlarding the 
information she deals out, in response to our 
inquiries, with proposals to sell us a small house- 
hold supply of fruits in liquors. And this in 
spite of the fact that we keep telling her we are 



The Quart ier by Night. 289 

from a Prohibition country ! The opaque lumino- 
sity which kodaks her intelligence when we 
answer, "No, thank you ; we are from a Prohibi- 
tion State," is curious to behold, for she has not 
the faintest idea whether we are referring to a 
province, the Salvation Army, or an insane 
asylum. 

Away over in the Place Saint Michel we enter 
the Latin Quartier. The first cafe we come to in 
this square is interesting in its way. It is the 
Cafe du Soleil. Here the famous Bohemian poet, 
Paul Verlaine, may usually be seen writing his 
verses and drinking absinthe. As he is a subject 
in himself, we ti^D our hats to him, and pass 
downstairs into one of the " caves," which are 
rather characteristic of the Quartier. A "cave" 
is the cellar floor of a cafe, and is frequented by 
a more hilarious company than the cafe proper. 
Young men who make pretensions to rh^mie and 
song are invited here to sing their latest pro- 
ductions. It is in the "caves" and the cafes 
chantants that the immense crop of French songs 
of the equivocal sort is yielded ; and many a 
well-known Parisian poet or singer has first 
distinguished himself in precisely this kind of a 
resort. 

These cellars are well j^atronised by men and 
women who find great sport in the ballads, and 

T 



290 Paris Days and Evenings. 

do not begrudge the seven or eight sous neces- 
sary for a chair, a glass of beer, light, heat, 
company, and entertainment for a whole even- 
ing. As we go down the stej)s we hear two 
youths talking loudly to each other. The pro- 
prietor soon invites them out on the pavement, 
where w^e follow the cr'owd, and enjoy the fun of 
a Paris street quarrel. 

One of the men is poorly dressed and small, 
but he is evidently brighter than his disputatious 
companion, who is a big, expensively-clothed 
young man, with a costly silk hat and a rich 
noisy cravat — a type one should scarcely expect 
to see in this neighbourhood. They argue hotly, 
and flourish their fists bravely under each other's 
noses, for there is no danger that a Frenchman 
will strike anyone as Englishmen or Americans 
are apt to do. In this way the human body is 
sacred in France. The refinements of fisticufis 
and prize-fights— refinements which top off our 
Anglo-Saxon civilisation — are but slightly shared 
by the Parisians. No more polite a scene can well 
be imagined than two Frenchmen of any class 
quarrelling before people. They observe the 
courtesies for which their race is noted, and 
which that French general immortalised at 
Fontenoy. I recently dallied away most of an 
afternoon watching two French stonemasons 



The QiLai^tiei' by Night. 291 

dispute. It was, comparatively speaking, such a 
courtly performance, something so refined, con- 
trasted with our graceless and brutal way of 
quarrelling and fighting in public in England 
and America, that it seemed a feast for my finest 
sensibilities. 

Our two Spartacuses keep politely warring, to 
the lively amusement of the arena of men, 
women, and boys Mdio shy in comments in such 
a manner as to tease on the verbal hostilities. 
You may enquire, " Where are the police all this 
time ? " The police do not interfere with any 
one in the Latin Quartier, unless serious injury 
is resulting. Herein the Parisians are philosophic. 
They realise that youth must toot its horn and 
blow off steam, and the rule is not to trouble 
the students and their associates, no matter how 
much disturbance they may kick up, providing 
always that no material damage is being done. 

In the Rue des Anglais we ferret out the vile 
little retreat called the Pere, Lunette (Father 
Spectacles), the most notorious place of the sort 
in the Quartier. If we happen to walk by this 
sinister haunt at noon, when the sun is hot and 
bright, we remark that the door still remains 
closed, and muffles the sound of ugly voices in 
this black den. Here three or four bandits and 
two of their female mates at once place before 



292 Paris Days and Evenings. 

us some slouch-eyed wine. We offer it to them, 
and they sip it with great relish. One of the 
thieves begins to sing and accompanies himself 
on a guitar. Another one squats down right in 
front of us, and proceeds to draw our portrait. 
Another villain sits up close to us to watch the 
crayon sketch develop, putting his arm around 
behind us to hold himself on the bench. Not 
to run any unnecessary risks, we quietly put 
and keep our hand on our pocket-book. 

The walls are covered with grotesque repre- 
sentations of prominent people, like Rochefort 
and Louise Michel. One or two of these crude 
pictures are "Realistic." In tw^o minutes our 
portrait is done, and given us for the considera- 
tion of one franc ; and we are free to confess to 
the robber that it is the best sketch we have 
ever had of ourselves. The precision with which 
he has caught the expression of our face, and 
the skill with which he has idealised it enouo;h 
to flatter our vanity, are indeed remarkable. The 
two women do not give much evidence of " hard- 
ness " in their countenances. The younger one, 
a woman about forty, looks as if she might be 
a respectable mother of a family. After some 
disputing and menacing, which we are forced to 
indulge in, in order to impress u^Don the cut- 
throats the fact that we are not newly-arrived 



The Q^iai^tier by Alight. 293 

" Engiislimen," fit to be "plucked," and do not 
propose to buy what we do not want, nor submit 
to extortions, we hie to the vicinity of tiie Sor- 
bonne — the heart of this student land. 

Here are the three celebrated cafes of the 
students — Cafe de la Source, Vachette, and the 
Brasserie d'Harcourt. They are on the Boulevard 
St Michel — " Boul' Mich' " — the main thorough- 
fare in this Latin realm. These cafes tempt no 
call from us, since they are in no sense odd 
resorts. But Rue ChampoUion, a grimy six- 
teenth-centur}^ alley which runs along betw^een 
these cafes and the Sorbonne, is filled with 
characteristic institutions of one kind and an- 
other. Let us go into one — a typical cafe 
chantant of the lower class. We find a narrow^ 
hall, well filled with people sitting at the tables, 
and drinking coffee and beer. The large man 
in black, who is promenading back and forth, is 
the proprietor. He is very handy to have about, 
because he is perfectly w^illing and able to oust 
into the street any one who proves obstreperous. 
In the centre of the room there is a small box 
platform, on which the singers stand. We put the 
cotton we brouo-ht wdth us into our ears, for the 
songs heard here can almost make a nausea scour 
the stone stomachs of the eavesdropping gar- 
goyles. 



2 94 Paris Days and Evenings. 

There is no programme. The audience calls 
from time to time for some singer among the 
crowd. The invited one comes forward and 
rehearses his newest song. The words are usually 
from his pen, and often the music. He is 
accompanied by a piano. Notice this young man 
who is singing now, with all the ease of a 
professional. He wears his overcoat, and holds 
his hat and cane in his hand. He is very amus- 
ing- — to judge from the vigorous laughtet which 
he sows up and down the hall. Frequently 
his selections are familiar to all, and if they 
have a chorus, everybody, including the pro- 
prietor, joins in the refrain. One of the choruses 
to-night is destined to ring in our ears for many 
a day, despite the cotton. It is a subtle com- 
bination of a good old-fashioned Methodist hymn 
and a Russian national anthem, with a hint of a 
Sodom and Gomorrah recklessness woven in. 

The leader of these improvised choruses at 
this cafe is a character. He is an impecunious 
Bohemian song- writer, locally known as Gringoire, 
because he is the type that Victor Hugo drew in 
"Notre-Dame de Paris." He is a small but de- 
termined-looking young man. His eyes twinkle, 
and a smile fringes the stern backg;round of his 
countenance. His trousers are too sliort, and 
they bag flagrantly at the knees. 



The O liar tier by N'ight. 295 

We look at the curious assembly. Good and 
bad seem hopelessly wedged in together, and the 
scene is calculated to confound the moralist. 
For instance, at a table just four feet away from 
us, are a most staid and respectable-looking man 
and woman about fifty-five years of age. They 
are well dressed, and are evidently prosperous 
bourgeois, who simply felt bored with lone- 
someness at home, and sauntered in here to be 
entertained in a risky Parisian way. 

Two items of interest picjue our reveries with 
interrogation points. One is, Does it not seem 
strange at first that the University of the Sor- 
bonne, with its Voltairean traditions and its 
atmosphere of free thought, and that the church 
Saint Severin, with its elaborate cult of Rouian 
Catholic superstition, should stand here side by 
side and prosper, and should have stood here side 
by side and prospered, during six long centuries ? 
The other quer}^ is, Does it not seem strange that 
both St Severin and the Sorbonne, which nurses 
the young men of France in its bosom, ap^^ear 
to take no notice of the notorious fact that the 
apartments, whose windows look in upon them, 
are occupied b}^ Jilles galantes, who live in the 
most open manner possible with the students, 
and flourish elbow to elbow with the Church and 
the University ? For six hundred years the 



296 Paris Days and Evenings. 

faculties and students apparently have felt tlie 
need of the spectacular diversions of this gay- 
sin, and the Church a]3parently has been thankful 
to get its pennies of repentance. 

The explanation of all this is to be found, in 
great part, in the fact that the students are, 
we may say, absolutely forbidden the society of 
each other's sisters. Denied by French custom 
the free and winning intercourse with respectable 
and intelligent young women, they accept that 
of the "p'tit's femm's." When the students 
sisters begin — as they will begin before very 
long — to dwell here in this Quartier, and prose- 
cute equal educational ambitions and privileges 
with their brothers, as in so many unimpeachable 
American institutions, the present Sorbonne 
fashions in student life and morals will com- 
mence to experience most desirable transforma- 
tions. 

In the Rue Cujas, near by the Rue ChampoUion, 
is the Inn of Death, which Ave must visit this 
evening, for it may die to-morrow, and it is only 
open at night. It belongs to that class of eccen- 
tric and ephemeral cafds which add a weird 
flavour to the nectar of the fame of Paris. An 
ashy blue and brimstone light burns over the 
black door, and we read the sign — Cabaret des 
Refroidis (Tavern of Cold Bodies). As we enter 



The Qicartier by N^iglit. 297 

the gruesome retreat, a black-garbed croqiie-mort 
(an undertaker's man) greets us in cadaverous 
tones. We sit down at a pine coffin, and the 
croque-mort, as he takes our order, moans out, 
" Four coffins," or " Four microbes," or anything 
sepulchral he chooses, for only vitiated beer is 
doled out here. It is the cheapest of establish- 
ments. Its furnishings could not have cost fifty 
francs. The room is hung in funeral cloth with 
w^hite trimmings. Five coffins serve as tables. 
Skulls are clumsily painted on the walls, and 
there is a daub representing a hideous display at 
the Morgue. 

We descend into the cave. Two quasi monks, 
in brown cowls, welcome us with " Voila des 
Machabees." We occup}^ one of the two 
benches. AVe look, through a doorway draped 
in black, at a coffin placed upright. One of our 
company wishes to feel the chill and pallor of 
death, and is invited to stand in the coffin. A 
winding-sheet is wrapped around his body. The 
head is left bare. The lio;ht is turned on the face 
of our friend in such a manner that decomposition 
appears to set in. A deathly white spreads over 
his visage. His features become drawn ; his eyes 
begin to sink into their dark sockets ; his lips 
wither and fall apart, and his teeth gleam forth ; 
black spots settle on the end of his nose, and it 



298 Paris Days and Evenings. 

decays ; the bony framework of his face grins at 
US, and then the bleached traceries of his skeleton 
are seen. All the while the monk is intoning — 
" Voila Machabsens ! He dies ! He wastes away ! 
Dust to dust ! Behold the horrors of death ! 
The eternal worm awaits you all!" TJie coffin 
is suddenly discovered to be empty, and the monk 
cries out: "Monte au ciel!" (Risen to heaven!) 
Another friend tastes of the ghastly inevitable, 
but the monks resuscitate him before our eyes. 
The flesh is made to creep back on his bones, and 
the colour of life is made to glow upon his cheeks. 
The monks pass around the penny plate — a human 
skull — and the seance is over. 

As we hasten on our midnight way home, dis- 
tressfully attempting to put to flight the osseous 
visions danoiing; before us in some danse macabre, 
the thought haunts us of how profoundly charac- 
teristic this tavern of Cold Bodies is of the Latin 
Quartier. Death locks arms with merriment and 
free-and-easy life in this youthful section of Paris. 
In the ballads, in the tales, in the ' drawings, in 
the esprit of this student world, the deceased 
gaieties of the grave are courted, and the devil 
is chucked under the chin. The School of Medi- 
cine, with its numberless following, full of their 
charnel pursuits, keeps this Latin pleasure-ground 
well adorned with skulls and cross-bones, and 



The Q^tartier by Night. 299 

makes a kind of necropolis ont of this city of 
youtli. The young collegians prefer to drink 
their beer from fleshless craniums if they can, and 
their fair mates to wear love carcass amulets in 
their bosoms. 

Here youth hugs dissolution, and coquettes 
light-heartedly with temptations, as if scalpel and 
bistoury had assured it of the dusty nothingness 
of the tomb, and, therefore, of freedom from end- 
less fire. This embracing of pleasures in the very 
jaws of the King of Terrors is one form of the 
eternal problem of the " Abbesse de Jouarre." 
Herein the philosopher would doubtless find an 
answer to the questions which posed before us in 
that concert hall we visited an hour ago in the 
Eue Champollion. That cafe chantant is the 
response to the funeral inn in the Rue Cujas. 

And the traditions of this mortuary glee have 
come down here in one direct and unbroken line 
from the midst of the Middle Ages. Six 
hundred 3"ears ago and more it was the 
favourite sport of the rollicking ancestors of 
these students to live in Holbeinic company 
with decay, and to "tutoyer" death, in this 
city which some antique chronicle characterised 
as " the paradise of women, the purgatory of 
men, and the hell of horses." The locality of this 
Cafe of Cadavers was one great centre of all that 



300 Paris Days and Evenings. 

mediaeval and defunct jocularity so famed in 
ancient colour, song, and story, and so quaintly 
inspired an fond by mortal uncertainty or 

despair. 

" Au la sueur de ton visaige 
Tu gagnerois ta pauvre vie, 
Apres long travail et nsaige 
Voicy la inort qui te convie." 



The Romance of a Student's 



Menage. 



June. 



Berrien, our hero, is from a province. He is a 
tliin, pale, homely youth, whose anaemic beard 
is making fitful sallies at growth in dishevelled 
coins of his face. He receives a remittance of 
one hundred and fifty francs from home on the 
first of each month. With this he is to earn his 
degree in medicine. But Berrien does not offer 
that kind of a perspective. A Romantic, a 
Bohemian, he gallantly revolts at the idea of dry 
study, and of the tediousness of becoming a 
prosaic professional man. He is a poet — a 
dreamer, who would ever dwell in the realms of 
romance. He was inspired with the thought, on 
reaching Paris last November, that there was no 
reason why he should not live the ideal in the 
Latin Quartier as easily as versify it, or, in other 
words, why he should not strike a bee-line for 
happiness instead of moping after it stupidly in 
the long, roundabout way of hard toil and dull 
respectability. 



302 Paris Days and Evenings. 

So lie proceeded at once to put his pursuit-of- 
happiness scheme into operation. He found a 
companion called Esther. Who is Esther ? 
Well, Esther is not as biblical as her name. She 
too is choosing a short cut in life, and is, for her 
part, a Communist in the matter of love. She 
comes from the gay and bibulous Bordeaux — a 
Bordelaise. She was an artist, — that is t.o say, 
she was an equestrienne in a circus that per- 
ambulated around provincial France. Finally 
, drifting to the metropolis, she took to dancing, 
appeared at the Gaiete, and became in time a 
coryphee at one of the national theatres. She 
was winning ambitious laurels with her pas de 
hourre and grands hattements, when she began 
to have severe palpitations of the heart, and her 
physician told her that she must abandon her 
profession. Her career was thus ruined — the 
career into wdiich she had so bravely leaped from 
her birthright of the circus ring. 

Esther joined at length the colony of girls 
who flit about the Latin country with the 
students. She is one of those women of the 
" Boul' Mich'," who frequently buy two sous worth 
of bread in the morning, eat half then, and the 
other half at night as their sole sustenance for 
the twenty-four hours. They think nothing 
of this, because the next day they may be 



The Romance of a Student's Menage. 303 

feasting at the expense of some generous ac- 
quaintance. 

Esther is twenty-eight years old, and Berrien 
is nineteen. She is not beautiful. The bloom 
of fresh youth is no longer on her cheeks. She 
is a delicately fashioned person. She smiles 
easily, has an effervescent air, and exhibits that 
open-swung, loose-jointed grace which belongs to 
artistes in athletics and the dance. If Esther 
has interesting opinions, no one, I fancy, has 
been able to ascertain what they are. On one 
occasion I asked her several questions to ascer- 
tain if she would say anything worth noting. 
The only responses I obtained were giggles 
and nervous twitchings of limbs ; signs of festive 
alarm at the suggestion of any shores of serious- 
ness — a kind of frightened paddling in the 
immense sea of her ignorance. She is such a 
devotee of gaiety that she insists on seeing 
merely the joyous side of her own misery. For 
she is really a pitiable character, or soon will be. 
She has no family, no abiding friends, not a sou, 
and knows not what day she may be turned out 
on the pavement by her Byronic lord and 
master. 

Berrien, then, arranged a menage — a house- 
hold. It is located in a small room, up six 
flights, and right in one of those roofs for wdiich 



304 



Paris Days and Evenings. 



the Mansards have made Paris celebrated during 
the last two hundred years. It is just across 




the street from the 
School of Medicine, 
and looks down on 
the site of Marat's 
house. The room is 
very poor and bare. 
It contains a trunk, 
a stand, two chairs, a 
bed, and there is also 
a fireplace which is the coldest spot in a French 
salon or chamber. The French word " fireplace," 



THE ROMANCE OF A STUDENTS 
MlilNAGE. 



The Romance of a Shidenf s Menage. 305 

like our word " cliarity," would freeze the ears of 
tlie North Pole. One thing you would remark 
is that the mantel is not ornamented with the 
traditional candelabra. A few card pictures and 
knick-knacks are tacked on the wall. 

Over Berrien's bed, which is the typical lit de 
sangle, famous in the world of the Latin Quartier, 
there are a pair of foils, a pistol, and a human 
skull — the emblems of death either in a duel for 
love or honour, or in suicide. He is fond of 
seeing these objects when he eats his meals, and 
when he wakes in the morning. Berrien does 
most of his thinking, reading, and verse-making 
in bed. I suppose that he would not object to 
following his medical lectures if this could be 
done in his room and on his back. He is some- 
thing like the patriot in the '•' Queen's Lace 
Handkerchief," who wanted to die for his country 
quietly at home, in bed, of old age. 

This is Berrien's Cythera. Several wall- 
closets, however, add some sj)ace to his room. 
A part of the premises, too, is the Mansard roof. 
One can walk out on it, sit there, and look over 
Paris. From it Berrien and Esther can j)eer 
over into the School of Medicine, and I 
imagine that Berrien on his roof feels a kind of 
lofty pity for his fellow-students who have to 
keep their eyes on their text-books and listen 

u 



3o6 Paris Days and Evenings. 

to tiresome professors. Out there in the upper 
air most of those wonderful, world-sweeping 
thoughts come to him. It is astonishing what 
a high house-top will do for one's brain. 
Herein Berrien differs from most people — he 
thinks on the peaks. 

He can tell you why Shakespeare would 
have had a wider renown if he had lived in Paris 
under Louis XIV. and written French ; why the 
present French Government is making a serious 
blunder in its course of Opportunism ; why 
Emperor William would better remain at Pots- 
dam, meekly pegging away at the Socialist 
question at the rate of ten hours a day, instead 
of pirouetting around Europe in a third-class 
yacht ; and he can tell you how Napoleon 
could have won by four o'clock at Waterloo 
without even bringing the Old Guard into 
action. 

Were you to contemplate Berrien's bower, you 
would exclaim, What a threadbare existence ! 
Threadbare, in truth, is a euphemism, for the 
existence he leads is very akin to filthiness. It 
is a lazy, sloven life, whose poetry and joy seem 
to fade into nothingness as soon as you set foot 
in the place. Formerly, we are assured, these 
liaisons in the Latin Quartier were wont to last 
months and sometimes years. Old Parisians 



The Romance of a Shcdenfs Mdnage. 307 

naively say that in their youth these meyiages 
were the result of sympathy, co-operation, and 
indeed love. Each member was faithful in all 
respects to the other, and interested in the 
other's welfare. They were a rather model sort 
of irregular household. Nowadays this has 
changed, it is claimed. The liaisons of our 
time are formed for a few days or weeks. There 
is little romance about them. They are prosaic, 
less self-sacrificing;, less o-enuine. Berrien's men- 
age is regarded as an unusual one, for it has run 
the whole college year. 

Now our two friends, as we have said, 
must get on with a hundred and fifty francs a 
month. But the curious thing about it is that 
they spend their money the first half of the 
month and almost starve the second half. This 
is a characteristic trait of the Bohemian student 
in Paris. During the first fortnight of each 
month Berrien and Esther live on the fat of the 
Latin Quartier. Esther gets a new hat and 
ribbon. Berrien procures a fresh cravat and a 
clean shirt. They sail up and down the avenues 
a,nd learn of all that is o:oino- on with the o-usto 
of the " boulevardiers." They pay calls, and 
blossom out in every way. 

One afternoon early in April I spied Esther 
and Berrien over on the Grand Boulevards, non- 



3o8 Paris Days and Evenings. 

clialantly promenading in the direction of tlie 
Opera. Who would have expected to find them 
so far from the Latin Quartier, and in the broad 
cosmopolitan world of the north side of the 
Seine? I soon discovered the explanation. Ber- 
rien was buttoned up in a new spring coat, and 
lending prestige to a resplendent silk hat, and 
Esther was sporting a new robe. Her robe 
was simple and tasteful. It just touched 
the ground, so that she had to appear to be 
holding it with that charming; embarrassment 
which always accompanies this action in the 
Farisiemie. 

Her spring hat crushes my feeble hope of 
anything like an adequate description. I do not 
suppose it cost five francs, for it is not money 
that goes the farthest in Parisian fashions. She 
probably trimmed the hat herself. It was 
decked with numerous spikes of ribbons, with 
sunflowers and tiger lilies, and with a collection 
of small Eiff'el Towers, each and all flaunting 
their boldness in a hundred directions in the 
colossal fretfulness of a Brobdingnagian porcu- 
pineness. The hat rim started low down in 
front, then curved up voluminously on the sides 
in an immense curl of magnificent sauciness, 
then down and then up, grandly, tremendously 
up, in a final, soaring expanse toward the infinite 



The Rouiaiice of a Siudenfs Manage. 309 

azure, grazing the stars as its wearer lightly 
tripped along. 



In the second fortnight of each month the 
problem for Berrien and Esther is reduced to 
about this: How are two persons to live two weeks 
on ten francs? You may ask, Why does he not bor- 
row a few francs until his next remittance comes ? 
Because he has already availed himself of this 
resource. During his first week in Paris last 
autumn he treated every one he met and lived 
so well. that at the commencement of the second 
week he had spent all the money he had brought 
with hini, and began borrowing. Berrien owes 
some fifty francs the first of each month, so 
that he is always behind. It appears to be 
a trait of the Latin Quartier student to 
lend money willingly as long as he has any, 
and to pay when he receives his monthly 
allowance. 

As a rule, Berrien and Esther manage in the 
following fashion to exist a fortnight on ten 



francs. They invest in a sack of potatoes, and 
eat potatoes, bread, and cheese. Esther is not 
only an equestrienne and a hallerine, but a cook. 
She will serve potatoes in various kinds of fries 
to-day, in a diversity of stews to-morrow, and 



310 Paris Days and Evenings. 

the next day in an assortment of purees. Slie 
can do potatoes in twenty-two w^ays. They 
stay quietly at home to avoid fatiguing the body 
and creating an appetite by rambling about 
town. The}^ have learnt that sleep is the great 
substitute for food. Thus they contrive to suffer 
as little as possible from their meagre diet, and 
can keep soul and body together on seven sous a 
day each, or ten francs for both of them for two 
weeks. This is a much less expensive plan 
than eating even at those amazingly cheap, 
white-faced places called cremeries, which are 
a godsend in Paris to the Bohemian qui na 
pas le sou. 

Berrien and Esther, nevertheless, have table 
boarders now and then. One of my friends in 
the Quartier tells me that he boarded with them 
last December. He paid them twenty-three sous 
a day — ten sous for breakfast and thirteen for 
dinner. The dinner was in four courses, for if 
you merely have bread and butter for a meal in 
Paris, the servant will persist in bringing them 
in instalments. I have never succeeded in 
making a French valet understand that I am 
disposed, when alone and in a hurry, to excuse 
the impropriety of his serving meat and potatoes 
at one and the same time. The four courses of 
the thirteen-sou repast at Berrien's were these : 



The Romance of a Student' s Menage. 3 1 1 

1st, soup ; 2nd, meat; 3rd, potatoes; 4tli, cheese. 
And for this price not only was wine furnished, 
but a cup of black coifee was included as a fifth 
course on Sundays. 

It was in the cold weather last January that 
Berrien and Esther suffered most from their 
penury. They happened to break a window- 
pane in their room, and as they had not enough 
clothing for themselves, they could not spare 
material to stop the opening, to say nothing of 
having the money necessary to buy a new pane. 
Without fuel, they were at times almost frozen. 
They chopped up what furniture they did not 
absolutely need, and made fires with that for two 
or three days. Fortunately they did not have to 
pay a fine of four -or five francs a week for short 
postage on letters from friends and acquaintances 
in America. 

It went hard with Berrien's poetic muse and 
Esther's gaiety under those circumstances, and I 
fear they quarrelled more than usual. Quarrelled ! 
One of the conspicuous features of these menages 
is that they harbour a vast amount of embroil- 
ment. Berrien and Esther indulge freely in this 
diversion. Indeed, the word quarrel is often too 
affectionate an expression for it — they fight. 
Berrien will throw the two chairs at his Dulcinea, 
pound with his fists that gentle head which he 



312 Paris Days and Evenings. 

has immortalised in so many a Petrarcliian 
sonnet, and catch her at length by the throat 
and strangle her until she is forced to sign a 
treaty on any terms. Esther, for her belligerent 
share, will pull out all Berrien's Byronic locks 
she can get hold of, scratch his visage with her 
finger-nails until it looks like a red-inked railroad 
map of the State of Ohio, and wind up in a kind 
of old-time circus fanfare and jvnale by spitting 
in her darling's face. 

The cause of this Bohemian ]q)Y and gaiety is 
this : Esther charges that Berrien loves to behold 
other fair eyes, and Berrien maintains the 
counter-charge that he is pullet-pecked. So it 
usually results in charges back and forth of 
sundry varieties. When they go out walking 
Esther makes Berrien look down frequently at 
the sidewalk right in front of him, so that none 
of her rivals may have the opportunity of stealing 
one of his glances. When they sit in the Luxem- 
bourg Gardens, she insists on his keeping his 
nose in his newspaper, so that he won't be, as 
she claims, "eternally gazing at the women." 
Berrien, on the other hand, denies these soft 
allegations ; " don't see why he can't be let alone," 
and so on. 

Yes, unfortunately, Esther is terribly jealous. 
Sometimes an envious fit seizes her when Berrien 



The Romance of a Shtdent's Manage. 3 1 3 

is away of an evening, and she locks him out. 
On his return he proceeds to hang the door and 
sketch the outlines of a tremendous "hullabaloo." 
Whereat several cats, that have quarters on that 
Mansard, are pleased to rub their backs against 
the moon and to take up the strain in long-drawn- 
out romantic wails, like the cries of Wagner's 
Valkyrs, across the night. Finally Berrien gets 
on the roof, and slips and slides and glooms and 
glances. On arriving at his dormer window he 
reaches in through the aperture which the broken 
j)ane has left, unlatches the window, and is met 
by his combative mate. Vigorous hostilities 
ensue, and continue until he is able to strangle 
her. This accomplished, they kiss and make up. 
Then, in order to have universal quiet, they both 
head a raid on the orchestra of cats that mean- 
while have been assembling from near and from 
far to symphonise the picturesque ^e^'^-mo^^/* which 
Berrien had furnished. 

At last serenity crowns the night, and sleep 
soothes the battle-weary. Berrien and Esther, 
for the statistical test of their pursuit-of-happi- 
ness plan, have kept a record of all their days of 
peace. They have done so with charcoal marks 
on the side of the chimney-piece. From Novem- 
ber until May the record stood — Five days free 
from scrimmao;es or war ! 

X 



3 1 4 Paris Days and Evenings. 

Once, during the coldest part of last winter, while 
they were in desperate straits from the lack 
of money, Esther concluded that she would earn 
a little each evening by lending proportions to 
some corps de ballet. Berrien scarcely fancied 
the project of her appearing before the caressing 
regard of an indiscriminate public ; but she went 
to the Porte St Martin Theatre, wdiere a spec- 
tacular show was being modelled, and engaged as 
^figurante for the consideration of two francs a 
performance. When she came home and reported 
this to her aristocratic companion, the idea, hav- 
ing assumed a more plastic form, seemed so repug- 
nant to his refined and high-spirited sense of 
propriety, and one thing and another, that' 
he decided he would starve rather than 
consent. Esther never returned to the Porte 
St Martin. 

As July drew nigh, with its annual August 
examinations, Berrien began to cram. He en- 
deavoured to persuade four weeks' work to 
answer for thirty or more. If you had heard 
Esther talk about the matter, you would have 
thought that she too was preparing to respond 
to the medical interrogatories. She was always 
saying : " We're buckling to study now ! We're 
working the ends of our finger-nails off these 
days ! We must arrive somehow ! Our ex ami- 



The Romance of a Shidenfs Manage. 3 1 5 

iiers are a precious lot of old ninnies, who 
are trying to make it liard for us just on 
purpose ! " 

The result was, of course, that Berrien failed to 
pass. It was so evident at once that he had 
been unanimously defeated, that he did not wait 
to hear from any of the " back counties." He 
parted with his weeping Andromache in only 
some six hexameters, and took the express train 
for the unth robbing bosom of his province. He 
lives at Saumur, the home of poor Eugenie 
Grande t. 

One of his chums in the Latin Quartier was 
telling me last week that Berrien faithfully sends 
Esther a basket of provisions now and then — • 
luscious pork chops, nice broadsides of bacon, 
delicious pigs' feet pickled in all their pitifulness, 
onions, peaches. He is said to write enthusiasti- 
cally of the great schemes of labour that he has 
mapped out for the approaching school year. This 
causes his friends in the Quartier to open the 
peripheries of huge smiles, for they feel assured 
that he will do nothing of the sort. 11 riest 
hon a 7'ien — " he is of no account," they insist. 
1 remarked to one of them yesterday that 
Berrien is young yet, and may take a favour- 
able turn. 

" No, not 230ssible," was the resjDonse. "Per- 



'^^i-^'^ 



316 Paris Days and Evenings. 

haps you don't know tliat at twenty-one he is 
to come into possession of one hundred thou- 
sand francs in his own right. No hope for 
him ! " • 



THE END. 



LEJe 



,^ 



